SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 12 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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It Came from Outer Space
Film (1953). Universal. Directed by Jack Arnold. Written by Harry Essex, based on a screen treatment by Ray Bradbury. Cast includes Richard Carlson, Charles Drake and Barbara Rush. 80 minutes. 3-D. Black and white. / This was Arnold's, and Universal's, first venture into the sf/Horror genre; it was also the first sf film to exploit a desert location (here the Mojave Desert), and the ...
Brazil
Brazilian Proto SF is being slowly rediscovered in the last decades, revealing some works that shed light on the problematic relationship between scientific ideas and the literature of fiction in the country. An early important text is Páginas da história do Brasil, escritas no ano 2000 ["Pages of a History of Brazil, Written in the Year 2000"] (1868-1872 in the newspaper O Jequitinhonha) by Joaquim Felício dos Santos (1828-1895), ...
Monster and the Girl, The
Film (1941). Paramount Pictures. Produced by Jack Moss. Directed by Stuart Heisler. Written by Anthony Stuart from his story. Cast includes Rod Cameron, Ellen Drew, Charles Gemora, Paul Lukas, Robert Paige, Onslow Stevens, Phillip Terry and George Zucco. 65 minutes. Black and white. / Susan Webster (Drew) leaves her small town to come to New York, where meets and marries Larry Reid (Paige). Unfortunately, as she discovers the following morning, Reid is a ...
Rose, Mark
(1939- ) US academic and author whose assistance in preparing Kingsley Amis's New Maps of Hell (1960) was acknowledged by its author. An apocalyptic Post-Holocaust short story, "We Would See a Sign" in Spectrum 3 (anth 1963) edited by Amis and Robert Conquest, did not lead to a fiction career, and Rose remains best known in the sf field ...
Zheng Wenguang
(1929-2003) Chinese author, born in Vietnam to ethnic Chinese parents, repatriated in the early days of the People's Republic, sometimes called the "father of Chinese sf" for establishing, in his article "Tantan Kehuan Xiaoshuo" ["Discussing the SF Novel"] (1958 Dushu Ribao), the didactic tone of Children's SF that allowed the genre to survive in an authoritarian environment hostile to imaginative fiction. A research fellow at ...
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. He began to publish work of genre interest with an sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" in Triquarterly for Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959]; he began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and later in ...