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Tuesday 6 October 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.
Site updated on 5 October 2026
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Tournier, Michel
(1924-2016) French screenwriter and author, active in French radio and television from 1949, whose first novel – Vendredi, ou les Limbes du Pacifique (1967; trans Norman Denny as Friday; Or, the Other Island 1969; children's version Vendredi, ou la Vie sauvage 1971; trans Ralph Manheim as Friday and Robinson: Life on Speranza Island 1972) – is a Robinsonade in which what would be a career-long ...
Body Snatchers
Film (1993). Warner Bros. Directed by Abel Ferrara. Written Stuart Gordon, Dennis Paoli and Nicholas St John, based on a story by Raymond Cistheri and Larry Cohen, based loosely in turn on the 1958 screenplay. Cast includes Gabrielle Anwar, Terry Kinney, Meg Tilly, Forest Whitaker and Billy Wirth. 87 minutes. Colour. / This low-budget remake (the second remake, the first being in 1978) of ...
Corlett, William
(1938-2005) UK actor, playwright and author, in the latter capacity mostly for older children, though much of his later work, which openly explores the lives of gay men, was written for adults. He is of sf interest mainly for the Gate of Eden trilogy, comprising The Gate of Eden (1974), an essentially associational tale which he adapted for Television as The Gate of Eden (1979). The Land Beyond (1975), which ...
Wiggins, Bethany
(1976- ) US author whose first novel, the Young Adult Shifting (2011), submits its young Shapeshifter protagonist to life in a New Mexico foster home where Navajo Skinwalkers sense her gift. The young protagonist of her first series, the Stung sequence comprising Stung (2013) and Cured (2014), awakens from something like ...
Cyborgs
The term "cyborg" is a contraction of "cybernetic organism" and refers to the product of human/machine hybridization. It was coined by Manfred E Clynes and Nathan S Kline in their article "Cyborgs in Space" (September 1960 Astronautics p26), which proposed "Altering man's bodily functions to meet the requirements of extraterrestrial environments". Early sf uses of the term appear in the Comic Space Man (1962) and Frank ...
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 ...