SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 15 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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Schoonover, Lawrence
(1906-1980) US author best known for his many historical novels. Central Passage (1962) is set after a nuclear Holocaust has demolished the Isthmus of Panama, setting the oceans astir and initiating a convulsive spasm of Climate Change with a new ice age threatened; its escalation is averted through a successful attempt to block the Isthmus again. In the meantime, Post-Holocaust ...
Sphere
Film (1998). Warner Bros presents a Baltimore Pictures and Constant c production in association with Punch Productions. Directed by Barry Levinson. Written by Paul Attanasio, Stephen Hauser and Kurt Wimmer, based on the novel Sphere (1987) by Michael Crichton. Cast includes Peter Coyote, Marga Gómez, Dustin Hoffman, Samuel L Jackson, Queen Latifah, Liev Schreiber and Sharon Stone. 134 minutes. Colour. / ...
Wilson, Hardy
(1881-1955) Australian painter, architect and author, most of whose writings espouse visions of Utopia soured by a persistent anti-Semitism, beginning with The Cow Pasture Road (1920). The fictional element in these texts varies from cursory to minimal. His vision of an orientalized ideal home called Celestion, a central glory of the imagined ideal City of Kurrajong, is central to almost all of this work, soaking it in a ...
Bennett, Cherie
(1960- ) US author of Young Adult novels, of a script – "Jitters" (2001) – for the television series Smallville (2001-2011) (see Superman); and, with her husband Jeff Gottesfeld (a Smallville scriptwriter), a series of Ties to the same series. One Young Adult novel of interest is Anne Frank and Me ...
Science Stories
US Digest-size magazine. Four bimonthly issues, October 1953 to April 1954. The first was published by Bell Publications, Chicago, the rest by Palmer Publications, Evanston; edited by Raymond A Palmer and Bea Mahaffey. Science Stories was effectively a continuation of Other Worlds. It printed no notable fiction, and continued much in the same vein as ...
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 ...