SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 14 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.
Site updated on 14 July 2025
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12 to the Moon
Film (1960). Luna. Directed by David Bradley. Written by DeWitt Bodeen, based on a story by Fred Gebhardt. Cast includes Anna-Lisa, Philip Baird, Tema Bey, Ken Clark, Tom Conway, Cory Devlin, Anthony Dexter, Michi Kobi, Robert Montgomery Jr, Roger Til, Richard Weber and John Wengraf. 74 minutes. Black and white. / An international crew of twelve astronauts embarks upon a flight to the Moon, which is uneventful except for a threatening encounter with "meteor ...
Eliot, George
Pseudonym of UK author Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880), none of whose major works engage in the fantastic; her most famous novel, Middlemarch (1871-1872 4vols), is central to any study of nineteenth-century English literature. She is of sf interest for one frequently reprinted and commented-upon novelette, The Lifted Veil (July 1859 Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine; 2000 ebook), which focuses on various forms of ESP, including prescience (see ...
Byrne, Monica
(1981- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Comedy at Kualoa" in Electric Velocipede #21/#22 for Fall 2010. Her first novel, The Girl in the Road (2014), is largely set in a Near Future some decades hence in which Africa is the newest superpower, India occupies the former superpower role of the faded USA, and a remarkable pontoon bridge known as the Trail ...
Stoddard, William O
(1835-1925) US editor, government official, inventor and author, Abraham Lincoln's Assistant Private Secretary 1861-1864, resigning for health reasons which also truncated his slightly later career as a United States Marshall in Arkansas. His patents were in the field of publishing. He began to publish fiction in 1869, producing in the end more than 100 volumes, mostly for young readers. Those of sf interest include two Lost Race novels: ...
Zheng Wenguang
(1929-2003) Chinese author, born in Vietnam to ethnic Chinese parents, repatriated in the early days of the People's Republic, sometimes called the "father of Chinese sf" for establishing, in his article "Tantan Kehuan Xiaoshuo" ["Discussing the SF Novel"] (1958 Dushu Ribao), the didactic tone of Children's SF that allowed the genre to survive in an authoritarian environment hostile to imaginative fiction. A research fellow at ...
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 ...