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Thursday 12 March 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 9 March 2026
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Flying Disc Man from Mars
US Serial Film (1950; cut vt Missile Monsters 1958). Republic Studios. Produced by Franklin Andreon. Directed by Fred C Brannon. Screenplay by Ronald Davidson. Cast includes Lois Collier, James Craven, Gegory Gaye (credited as Gregory Gay) and Walter Reed. Serial version in twelve instalments, total 167 minutes. Feature version 75 minutes. Black and white. / Pilot Kent Fowler (Reed), armed with an experimental ...
Chetwynd, Tom
(1938-2012) UK teacher and author, son of Bridget Chetwynd, who concentrated mostly on nonfiction studies in which Christianity and Zen Buddhism are persuasively married, including Zen and the Kingdom of Heaven (2001). His Dystopia, The Copper Cow (1962), portrays a Near Future Britain in hyperbolically surreal terms. [JC]
Palmer, Ada
(1981- ) US academic and author, who teaches Early Modern European History at the University of Chicago. She is of sf interest for an ambitious ongoing sequence, the Terra Ignota series, comprising Too Like the Lightning (2016), Seven Surrenders (2017), The Will to Battle (2017), and Perhaps the Stars (New York: Tor, 2021), all to date set in the twenty-fifth century, 200 years after a planetary ...
Wood, Samuel Andrew
(1887-1966) UK journalist and prolific author, mostly of thrillers (some as by Robin Temple), active in the Magazines from about 1911; he wrote four works of some interest, three of them Lost Race tales: The Isle of Forgotten People (1925) as by Thompson Cross, an unusually violent example of this subgenre set in a radium-rich ring of extinct volcanoes in China; Winged Heels (1927), in which a quest for a ...
Stranger Things
US online tv series (2016-current). 21 Laps Entertainment and Monkey Massacre for Netflix. Created by Matt Duffer and Ross Duffer. Written by Paul Dichter, Justin Doble, Matt Duffer, Ross Duffer, Jessica Mecklenburg, Jessie Nickson-Lopez and Alison Tatlock. Directed by Matt Duffer, Ross Duffer and Shawn Levy. Cast includes Millie Bobby Brown, Joe Keery, David Harbour, Charlie Heaton, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Matthew Modine, Shannon Purser, Winona Ryder, Noah Schnapp and Finn ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...