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Saturday 11 April 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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Black Magic M-66
Japanese Original Video Animation (OVA) (1987). Based on the Manga by Masamune Shirow. AIC. Directed by Hiroyuki Kitakubo. Written by Masamune Shirow. Voice cast includes Ichiro Nagai, Yoshiko Sakakibara and Chisa Yokoyama. 47 minutes. Colour. / When a sabotaged military aircraft crashes into a forest, the two M-66 anti-personnel automated soldiers (see Androids) it ...
Clair, René
Pseudonym of French filmmaker and author René-Lucien Chomette (1898-1981) whose first feature film, Paris qui Dort (1924), is of sf interest; though many of his subsequent movies, in France, the UK and America, were of fantasy interest, their immersion in the coils of Fantastika defaulted to the unargued and the oneiric. A partial exception is It Happened Tomorrow ...
Invader Zim: Enter the Florpus
US animated tv film (2019). Nickelodeon Animation Studio. Executive Producers Mary Harrington and Jhonen Vasquez. Art Director Jenny Goldberg, Storyboard Director Jake Wyatt. Written by Jhonen Vasquez. Voice cast includes Andy Berman, Rodger Bumpass, Olivia d'Abo, Melissa Fahn and Richard Horvitz. 72 minutes. Colour. / This sequel to the television series Invader Zim (2001-2002, 2006) opens with twelve-year-old Dib Membrane (Berman) ...
Big Dumb Objects
A jocular though affectionate piece of sf Terminology which seems to have been coined by Roz Kaveney in her retrospective essay "Science Fiction in the 1970s" (June 1981 Foundation), with specific reference to the titular Macrostructure of Larry Niven's Ringworld (1970). The term became ...
Guran, Paula
(? - ) US editor, reviewer, anthologist, agent, and columnist heavily involved in many aspects of the genre since the 1990s, specializing in dark fantasy. She produced and edited the pioneering weekly email newsletter DarkEcho (which won International Horror Guild awards as best publication in 1998 and 1999, and a Bram Stoker award for nonfiction in 1999), and was editor of Horror Garage magazine from 2000-2002. / She has contributed ...
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. He began to publish work of genre interest with an sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" in Triquarterly for Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959]; he began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and later in ...