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Thursday 19 February 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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Yerex, Cuthbert
Pseudonym of Canadian-born author Mary Estella Yerex (1867-1947), in the US from an undetermined point after 1883, when she married Arthur Cuthbert in Ontario; her Christopher Brand: Looking Forward (1934) is a relatively late response to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), in which the abolition of money, and other radical solutions, ends the Great Depression. [JC]
Smith, Clark Ashton
(1893-1961) US sculptor and author, of primary interest for his tales of Science Fantasy and horror (see Horror in SF); the rich style (sometimes idiomatic, sometimes "jewelled" in the early Lord Dunsany manner) and baroque invention of this work did much to transform the interplanetary romance of the early years of the century into the full-fledged Post-World War Two ...
It Conquered the World
Film (1956). Sunset/American International. Produced and directed by Roger Corman. Written by Charles B Griffith, though screenplay credit is to Lou Rusoff. Cast includes Beverly Garland, Peter Graves and Lee Van Cleef. 71 minutes. Black and white. / This film only just survives its ridiculous monster (cone-shaped with fangs) and the usual hurried air of a Corman production, but there's plenty of interest in the tale of an idealistic but weak ...
Fallaw, L M
(1908-1990) US author of whom little is known beyond his receipt of a 1929 English BA from Furman University (Greenville, South Carolina) and 1931 MA from Stanford University, California. His two-book Ugglians sequence, comprising The Ugglians (1956 chap) and Second Book of Ugg: The Ugglians at Large (1959), contains some fairly sharp sf Satire based on the arrival in America of Ugg the First from his African kingdom, intending to ...
Rafcam, Nal
(? - ) Undoubtedly pseudonymous author – backwards this name reads MacFarlan – of the imaginatively unremarkable sf novel The Troglodytes, or Dwellers of the Deep (1961; vt The Troglodytes 1962). The eponymous Lost Race of Aliens is discovered under Antarctica as they come to the surface in a misguided attempt to stop nuclear testing (see ...
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 ...