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Friday 20 June 2025
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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Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Berkeley, Reginald
(1890-1935) UK soldier, politician – Liberal Member of Parliament 1922-1924 – playwright and author in various genres, in active service during World War One. Apparently inadvertently, he created one of the lasting myths of the conflict in his novel about the German execution of Edith Cavell, Dawn: A Biographical Novel of Edith Cavell (1928), in which a German soldier named Rammler refuses to participate in the firing squad, and is ...
Elliott, Bruce
(1914-1973) US author and editor, active mainly in the sf field in the early 1950s, though his first story of genre interest was "Jungle Jazz" for Doc Savage magazine in June 1944; in the 1940s, he also wrote several stories for the magazine sequence The Shadow (see The Shadow). His sf novels – Asylum Earth (October 1952 Startling; 1968) and ...
Attack the Block
Film (2011). Studio Canal, Film4, and the UK Film Council present a Big Talk Pictures production. Written and directed by Joe Cornish. Cast includes John Boyega, Nick Frost, Luke Treadaway and Jodie Whittaker. 88 minutes. Colour. / An ostentatiously British sibling to Skyline (2010) recentred on the urban teenage underclass with a namecheck to J G Ballard, television veteran Cornish's first feature seeks to freshen ...
British Science Fiction Association Award
This Award developed from the original British Fantasy Award, which was sponsored by the British Science Fiction Association and initially made to a writer: John Brunner won the first in 1966. Following various organizational difficulties the award was relaunched in 1970 as the British Science Fiction Association Award – usually ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...