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Thursday 12 March 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.
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Soviet Union
The vast majority of the sf from what until 1991 was the Soviet Union, especially that translated into English, was in the first instance written and published in Russian (see Russia). A small amount of Soviet sf exists in the various languages other than Russian, notably Ukrainian, in which the dissident writer Oles Berdnyk writes. Little of this material has been translated into Russian, let alone English. The break-up of the USSR will certainly in due course ...
Garfinkle, Richard
(1961- ) US author whose first novel, Celestial Matters (1996), is an Alternate Cosmos tale in which the Ptolemaic universe is real: celestial bodies are positioned in crystalline spheres around Earth, which is the centre of the universe; travel to the planets is via sailing ship. His second novel, All of an Instant (1999), posits a "location" outside of Time and space called the ...
Turner, Alice K
(1939-2015) US editor and critic who from 1980 to 2000 served as fiction editor of Playboy, in which capacity her editorial skills were praised by Robert Silverberg; after her departure, Playboy's long-established hospitality to sf was much diminished. She edited two Anthologies of fiction from the magazine, of which The Playboy Book of Science Fiction (anth 1998) is a good ...
Genesis II
Made-for-tv film (1973). CBS-TV. Directed by John Llewellyn Moxey. Written by Gene Roddenberry. Cast includes Ted Cassidy, Alex Cord, Mariette Hartley and Percy Rodriguez. 90 minutes. Colour. / Produced by Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, this was a pilot for a television series that was never made. After a Suspended-Animation experiment goes wrong, a scientist wakes in ...
McClure's Magazine
US Slick magazine published by S S McClure, edited by Ida Tarbell and others. Monthly June 1893 to January 1926 (irregularly towards the end). Recommenced June 1926 as a romance magazine. Merged with Smart Set in April 1929. / Samuel S McClure (1857-1949) made his money establishing the first US newspaper syndicate, and used this knowledge when he launched his monthly magazine to save costs by drawing some of his stories from those published in Britain, ...
Nicholls, Peter
(1939-2018) Australian editor and author, primarily a critic and historian of sf through his creation and editing of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction [see below]; resident in the UK 1970-1988, in Australia from 1988; worked as an academic in English literature (1962-1968, 1971-1977), scripted television documentaries, was a Harkness Fellow in Film-making (1968-1970) in the USA, worked as a publisher's editor (1982-1983), often broadcast film and book reviews on BBC Radio from 1974 and ...