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Friday 11 September 2026
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for what we mean by Science Fiction; here for the masthead; here for some Statistics; here for the Acknowledgments; here for the FAQ; here for advice on citations. Find entries via the search box above (more details here) or browse the menu categories in the grey bar at the top of this page.
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Fighting Devil Dogs, The
US Serial Film (1938). Republic Pictures. Directed by William Witney and John English. Written by Franklin Adreon, Ronald Davidson, Barry Shipman and Sol Shor. Cast includes Herman Brix, Lester Dorr, Sam Flint, Perry Ivins, John Picorri, Lee Powell, Hugh Sothern and Eleanor Stewart. Twelve chapters, each 13-16 minutes, save for the double-length opener. Black and white. / A US marine unit arrives at a military outpost in Linchuria (not far from ...
Comic Inferno
A more or less self-explanatory item of Terminology coined by Kingsley Amis in New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction (1960), describing sf which cheerfully extracts Satire or outright black Humour from a scenario rooted in Dystopia. Examples cited by Amis include Anthony Boucher's ...
Johnston, Aaron
(? - ) US screenwriter, playwright and author, whose work in the latter capacity has been as a collaborator with Orson Scott Card in various recent works, including a Technothriller, Invasive Procedures (2007), and a new prequel series in the Ender universe, the Ender: First Formic War sequence, beginning with ...
Gloag, John
(1896-1981) UK author, whose World War One experiences in the trenches – he was gassed by his own side – deeply affected his work. Though he wrote several novels, he was primarily active, from 1921, in the fields of social history, architecture and design, and his first work of sf interest was the nonfiction Artifex; Or, the Future of Craftsmanship (1926 chap), an early contribution to its publisher's To-day and To-morrow ...
Drigin, Serge
(1894-1977) Russian artist and illustrator, in active service during World War One, in UK from the early 1920s, who variously signed himself as Sergie, Sergey, S, S R, or Serge R Drigin; much of his early work appeared in various action magazines, his sf-related work appearing in Scoops, Fantasy, and elsewhere. For some years from around 1934, he drew Comics for ...
Nicholls, Peter
(1939-2018) Australian editor and author, primarily a critic and historian of sf through his creation and editing of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction [see below]; resident in the UK 1970-1988, in Australia from 1988; worked as an academic in English literature (1962-1968, 1971-1977), scripted television documentaries, was a Harkness Fellow in Film-making (1968-1970) in the USA, worked as a publisher's editor (1982-1983), often broadcast film and book ...