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Sunday 12 July 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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Stiegler, Marc
(1954- ) US software developer and author who began publishing his characteristic Hard-SF stories with "The Bully and the Crazy Boy" in Analog for November 1980, and whose short work, assembled in The Gentle Seduction (coll 1990), promulgates technological solutions to neatly couched problems (see Technology); "The Gentle Seduction" (April 1989 ...
Graydon, Robert Murray
(1890-1937) US-born author, long in the UK, of fiction for boys, including several Sexton Blake titles. He also wrote as by Murray Hamilton, Robert Murray and Murray Roberts, most of his work under the last of these names appearing in the Captain Justice sequence. He was the son of the much more prolific William Murray Graydon (1864-1946). [JC/RR]
Looper
Film (2012). FilmDistrict/TriStar Pictures. Directed by Rian Johnson, starting Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis and Emily Blunt. Written by Johnson. Colour. 118 minutes. / It is 2044 and Joe (Gordon-Levitt) is a looper, a paid killer who murders people sent back from the further future (thus eliminating any evidence of the crime). Obviously this Time Travel premise makes no sense but it exists to allow director Johnson to explore the possibility of ...
Halliday, Mags L
Working name of (apparently) Liz Halliday (1971- ), used because another author with a similar name – Liz Holliday – has also contributed work to the Doctor Who universe. Halliday's Tie, Doctor Who: History 101 (2002), in the Doctor Who: New Adventures subset, features the presence of Eric Blair (George Orwell) in the Spanish Civil War, where surreal displacements between ...
Rocketship X-M
Film (1950; vt Expedition Moon). Lippert. Produced, directed and written by Kurt Neumann. Cast includes Lloyd Bridges, John Emery and Osa Massen. 78 minutes. Black and white. / This cheap movie was hastily made to beat the more illustrious Destination Moon (1950) to the theatres. A Rocket on its way to the Moon is diverted by a storm of meteors and lands on ...
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 ...