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Thursday 10 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 7 July 2025
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Road, The
Film (2009). Dimension Films and 2929 Productions present a Nick Wechsler/Chockstone Pictures production. Directed by John Hillcoat. Written by Joe Penhall, based on The Road (2006) by Cormac McCarthy. Cast includes Robert Duvall, Viggo Mortensen, Guy Pearce, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Charlize Theron and Michael K Williams. 111 minutes. Colour. / A father and son struggle to survive in a Near Future blighted by ...
Overland Monthly, The
US magazine whose first editor was Bret Harte (who resigned in January 1871), published in San Francisco by A Roman & Co, monthly, July 1868-December 1875, then again January 1883-July 1935. Under the editorship of Millicent Washburn Shinn (1858-1940) a special "Twentieth Century" issue – June 1890 – contained articles and essays all directly related to Edward Bellamy's then much discussed work ...
Ruuth, Marianne
(1931-2007) Swedish-born journalist and author, in US from early adulthood; her Near Future American Dystopia, Outbreak (1977), is set a beleaguered, authoritarian Keep, its population divided into "primaries" and "secondaries"; women are kept subservient (see Feminism; Women in SF). A rebellion is mounted by exiles. [JC]
Freeman, Gillian
(1929-2019) UK author active from around 1955; she is of sf interest for The Leader (1966), set in the kind of Near Future Dystopian UK threatened, as not infrequently in novels of this category published in post-war UK, by the rise of a fascist nonentity through an increasingly ruthless exploitation of racial and ethnic prejudices to promote his Britain First party. The Undergrowth of Literature (1967), ...
Lewin, Leonard C
(1916-1999) US author of an sf Satire – a Parody published in the shape of a spoof dissertation, Report from Iron Mountain: On the Possibility and Desirability of Peace (1967) – which presents the conclusions of a US Government commission formed to consider the economic and political threat of world peace. In a tone of cunningly egregious Realpolitik, the commission urges that the world be kept on a continual ...
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 ...