SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 15 January 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 13 January 2025
Sponsor of the day: Joe Haldeman
Oblivion
American film (2013). Universal Pictures, Relativity Media, Monolith Pictures. Directed by Joseph Kosinski. Written by Karl Gajdusek and Michel Arndt from an unpublished Graphic Novel by Kosinski. Cast includes Tom Cruise, Morgan Freeman, Olga Kurylenko, Melissa Leo and Andrea Riseborough. 124 minutes. Colour. / In 2017, Earth at great cost beats off an Invasion from space by the Alien ...
West, Lindsay
Pseudonym of US author Nancy Weber (1942- ), married to Charles Platt (1977-circa 1980), who writes romances as by Jennifer Rose. The Empire of the Ants (1977) is a Tie novelizing The Empire of the Ants (1977; vt H G Wells' Empire of the Ants) directed by Bert I Gordon. [JC]
Jünger, Ernst
(1895-1998) German author – his surname is sometimes given in English as Juenger – active from 1911, when his first poems were published, until around 1997 (see Longevity in Writers). His early works reflected his experiences in World War One, the hellishness of which he responded to at the time in his long-unpublished Kriegstagebuch 1914-1918 ["War Diaries"] ...
Blob, The
1. Film (1958). Tonylyn/Paramount. Directed Irvin S Yeaworth Jr. Written by Kay Linaker, Irving H Milgate, Theodore Simonson. Cast includes Aneta Corseaut, Steve McQueen and Earl Rowe. 86 minutes. Colour. / An Alien Blob which grows by absorbing flesh reaches Earth in a hollow meteorite – whose impact is witnessed by the young hero Steve Andrews (McQueen) and his girlfriend Jane Martin (Corseaut) – and duly begins to consume the ...
Aldrin, Buzz
Working name of US fighter pilot (in Korea), astronaut with a research degree in orbital mechanics, rocket design entrepreneur and author Edwin Eugene Aldrin (1930- ), whose first space flight was in Gemini XII in 1966, and whose most famous extraterrestrial moment was the Moon Walk in 1969 in which Neil Armstrong took the first step. His first sf novel is Encounter with Tiber (1996) with John Barnes. Told by an historian ...
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 ...