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Tuesday 17 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.
Site updated on 16 February 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Operation Ganymed
Film (1977). Pentagrama/Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen. Written and directed by Rainer Erler. Cast includes Horst Frank, Uwe Friedrichsen, Claud Theo Gaestner, Dieter Laser, Jurgen Prochnow and Vicky Roskilly. 126 minutes, cut to 120 minutes. Colour. / This grim German film emerges as a realist response to fantasies like Planet of the Apes (1968). On their return to Earth, five survivors of a three-ship, 21-man mission to Ganymede crashland ...
Gas-s-s-s, Or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World ...
Full title: Gas-s-s-s, or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It. / Film (1970; vt Gas! or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It). San Jacinto, American International Pictures. Produced and directed by Roger Corman. Written by George Armitage. Cast includes Talia Coppola, Robert Corff, Bud Cort and Elaine Giftos. 79 minutes cut to 77 minutes. ...
Strange Worlds
US Comic (1950-1955). Fourteen issues. Avon Periodicals, Inc.. Artists include Gene Fawcette, Everett Raymond Kinstler, Joe Kubert, Joe Orlando and Wally Wood. Though fourteen issues were published, they were numbered #1-#9 (1950-1952), then #18-#22 (1954-1955), the latter sequence continuing the numbering of the recently ended Horror magazine Eerie (1951-1954, 17 issues), itself presumably a ...
Billett, Mabel Broughton
(1892-1964) Canadian author, in USA from 1936; of her four detective novels, one is of some sf interest. In The Robot Detective (1932), an immobile Robot, fed information through punch-cards (and better perhaps described as a primitive Computer), discusses a case with his/its human operator, who then goes out into the British Columbia landscape to capture the villain. Her fourth novel, "The Smooth Silence" (1936 ...
Avallone, Michael
(1924-1999) US author active since the early 1950s under a number of names in various genres, most active in the 1960s. Although he began publishing genre fiction with "The Man Who Walked on Air" (September 1953 Weird Tales), and though some stories of mild interest appear in Tales of the Frightened (coll 1963; vt Boris Karloff Presents Tales of the Frightened 1973) (see also Lyle Kenyon Engel), ...
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 ...