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Tuesday 9 December 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.
Site updated on 8 December 2025
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Butler, Samuel
(1835-1902) UK artist, author, traveller and speculative thinker, whose family-induced sojourn in New Zealand 1859-1864 gave him raw material for Erewhon (see below) but did not cure him of his artistic inclinations; his best-known single work, the posthumously published autobiographical novel The Way of all Flesh (1903), describes the long conflict between Butler and his minister father, a conflict which also provided much of the force of the ...
Australia
Much early Australian sf falls into subgenres which can be described as sf only controversially: Lost-Race romances, Utopian novels and Near-Future Political thrillers about racial invasion (see Race in SF; Yellow Peril). / Works of utopian speculation began appearing in Australia about the middle of the ...
Rocket Attack U.S.A.
Film (1961; vt Five Minutes to Zero). Exploit Films/Joseph Brenner Associates. Produced by Barry Mahon. Directed by Mahon. Written by uncertain, possibly by Mahon. Cast includes Monica Davis and John McKay. 68 minutes. Black and white. / US special agent John Manston (McKay) is sent to the Soviet Union to find out how much data the Soviets have obtained from their Sputnik One satellite. Deposited by plane in a remote area, he makes his way to Moscow by foot and teams up with ...
Steiger, Brad
Writing pseudonym of US author Eugene E Olson (1936-2018), who began to publish work of genre interest with "Three Tales for the Horrid at Heart" in Fantastic for January 1963 and subsequently wrote much supposed nonfiction in the field of UFOs, Alien abduction, the paranormal, the reality of Atlantis, and so forth [not listed below]. His novels tend to deal with these and related ...
Koch, Eric
(1919-2018) German-born broadcaster, Television producer, academic and author, in UK from 1935, in Canada from 1940, several of whose novels are of some sf interest. In The French Kiss: A Tongue in Cheek Political Fantasy (1969), set in a Near-Future Canada threatened – as usual – by separatism, a Reincarnated colleague of Napoleon muses on de Gaulle's similarity to the ...
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 ...