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Sunday 13 July 2025
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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Dreamcatcher
Film (2003). Castle Rock Entertainment presents a Kasdan Pictures production in association with Village Roadshow Pictures and NPV Entertainment. Directed by Lawrence Kasdan. Written by William Goldman and Lawrence Kasdan, based on the novel Dreamcatcher (2001) by Stephen King. Cast includes Giacomo Baessato, Rosemary Dunsmore, Morgan Freeman, Mikey Holekamp, Thomas Jane, Eric Keenleyside, Jason Lee, Damian Lewis, Timothy Olyphant, Joel ...
Defoe, Gideon
(1976- ) UK author whose very Young Adult Pirates! sequence beginning with The Pirates!: An Adventure with Scientists (2004), spoofishly but entertainingly engages an incompetent pirate band – whose banter shows the influence of Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969-1974) – in various adventures back and forth throughout the nineteenth century, as seen ...
Schutz, Heinrich
(1888-1945) German biologist and author of Der sterbende Gletscher ["The Dying Glacier"] (1928; trans Frank Barnes as When Mammoths Roamed the Frozen Earth 1929), a Prehistoric SF tale describing in melodramatic terms the end of the last Ice Age, with mammoths and other stranger Monsters battling each other for food, and a Lost Race. Schutz's ...
Coatsworth, J Scott
(? - ) US author much of whose output has been concentrated on various subseries in his Liminal Sky sequence of Space Operas, whose gay protagonists engagingly explore themselves, the worlds they encounter, and find romance (see Sex). The first of these, the Ariadne Cycle beginning with The Stark Divide (2017), focuses on three ...
Curse of the Faceless Man
US film (1958). Robert E Kent Productions. Directed by Edward L Cahn. Written by Jerome Bixby. Cast includes Richard Anderson, Bob Bryant, Elaine Edwards, Felix Locher, Adele Mara and Luis Van Rooten. 67 minutes. Black and white. / In Pompeii, amongst the ruins of a temple dedicated to Isis, Archaeologists discover a lava covered body from the time of the 79 CE eruption; examined by museum curator Dr. Carlo Fiorello (Van Rooten), he finds the covering ...
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 ...