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Tuesday 14 January 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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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Landis, S M
(1829-1902) US clergyman and man of medicine (but not a doctor) whose theories about physical and mental health are promulgated in the 100 chapters of An Entirely New Feature of a Thrilling Novel!: Entitled, The Social War of the Year 1900; Or, the Conspirators and Lovers!: A Lesson for Saints and Sinners (1872), in which a healer, whose powers are sufficient for him to be described as a proto-Superman, combats evil and brings good sense (and a savage ...
Planeta Bur
Russian film (1962; vt Planet of Storms; vt Storm Planet; vt Cosmonauts on Venus). Leningrad Studio of Popular Science Films. Directed by Pavel Klushantsev. Written by Alexander Kazantsev, Klushantsev. Cast includes Kyunna Ignatova, Gennadi Vernov, Vladimir Yemelyanov and Georgi Zhonov. 85 minutes, cut to 74 minutes. Colour. / Cosmonauts land on Venus, accompanied by a robot that plays dance music (thus ...
Villeneuve, Denis
(1967- ) Canadian film director and screenwriter. Born in Bécancour, Quebec, into a Francophone family, Villeneuve has directed both French- and English-language films. He began making short films while in high school and later pursued film studies at the Université du Québec à Montréal. He is the director of the big-budget sf movies Arrival (2016), ...
Hill, William Boyle
(circa 1861-1953) Irish author, resident in Australia, whose novel A New Earth and a New Heaven (1936) is of exceedingly moderate sf interest for its advocacy of a garden-city subtopian future (see City), but which comes somewhat to life on its protagonists' visit to a Lost World – in the heart of Australia – whose inhabitants are in touch with Mars. [JC]
Creature from the Black Lagoon, The
Film (1954). Universal. Directed by Jack Arnold. Written by Harry Essex, Arthur Ross, from a story by Maurice Zimm. Cast includes Julia Adams, Ricou Browning (uncredited), Richard Carlson and Richard Denning. 79 minutes. Black and white. 3-D. / A humanoid creature with gills successfully resists attempts by three scientists – attracted to the area by the discovery of a fossilized hand with fins – to take him from his native lagoon in the ...
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 ...