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Sunday 14 June 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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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Franke, Herbert W
(1927-2022) Austrian-born author and scientist who, after receiving a doctorate in Vienna in 1950, moved to Munich, where he taught cybernetic aesthetics at the University of Munich; he has also written as by Sergius Both. After publishing considerable nonfiction in the 1950s, mostly on either speleology or computer graphics (of which he was a pioneer), he also began publishing sf: at first speculative short stories such as those assembled in ...
Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
Film (1989). Interscope Communications/Soisson-Murphey/De Laurentiis. Director Stephen Herek. Written by Chris Matheson, Ed Solomon. Cast includes Robert V Barron, Terry Camilleri, George Carlin, Al Leong, Keanu Reeves, Jane Wiedlin and Alex Winter. 89 minutes. Colour. / Because the tranquillity of future life depends on the cultural changes brought about by a late-twentieth-century rock band called Wyld Stallyns, an emissary from the future named Rufus (Carlin) undergoes ...
Wylie, Philip
(1902-1971) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Seeing New York by Kiddie Car" (1926 Zest); some of the early work posthumously assembled in The Celestial City (coll 2025) is of such interest. By World War Two he had become notorious for his flamboyant but penetrating surveys of American mores and behaviour; he coined the term "Momism" to describe a tendency among Americans to sacralize motherhood, thus making family dynamics and morality ...
Strandberg, Mats
(1976- ) Swedish journalist and author, most of whose novels to date have been fantasy, including the Engelfors Trilogy beginning with Cirkeln (2011; trans Per Carlsson as The Circle 2012), all written with Sara Bergmark Elfgren. Färjan (2015; trans Agnes Broome as Blood Cruise 2018) is a Vampire tale set 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 ...