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Tuesday 21 July 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 20 July 2026
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Faceless, The
US metal band formed in Encino, Los Angeles in 2004, active through many line-up changes. Their second album, Planetary Duality (2008), is a concept album about the takeover of Earth by Aliens from an alternate Dimension, somewhat bizarrely inspired by conspiracy theorist David Icke’s "non-fiction" book The Children of the Matrix (2001). The relentlessly hyperactive drumming, high speed guitar solos and ...
Moore, Robin
Working name of US author Robert Lowell Moore Jr (1925-2008), perhaps best-known for The Green Berets (1965), and most of whose works of sf interest were Technothrillers, usually with a Cold War background, as in The Chinese Ultimatum (1976) with Edward McGhee, where a 1980s non-nuclear war between China and the USSR ultimately regionalizes a non-participant America. ...
Welsh, Louise
(1965- ) UK author whose six novels to date range across several genres, from detections to historicals, none of the first five with fantastic content; of sf interest is The Plague Times Trilogy beginning with A Lovely Way to Burn (2014). Disaster in the form of an extremely deadly Pandemic known as the Sweats strikes very-Near Future ...
Welles, Paul O'M
(? - ) US author of Project Lambda (1979), a Near Future Dystopian Satire set in an America where homosexual men are first murdered and then – after the government sees an opportunity to publicly humiliate any survivors – sent to concentration camps where they will be castrated; but public outrage saves the day. [JC]
Serpent's Egg, The
Film (1977). Known in Germany as Das Schlangenei. Dino De Laurentiis Corporation/Rialto Film/Bavaria Film. Directed and written by Ingmar Bergman. Cast includes Heinz Bennent, David Carradine, Gert Fröbe, Liv Ullmann and James Whitmore. 119 minutes. Colour. / Ingmar Bergman's thirty-eighth film as director has generally been understood as a failed attempt to give an intimate portrait of Weimar Berlin in 1923, a place and a period he did not know and was unlikely to ...
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 ...