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Thursday 19 June 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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Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Ogino Makoto
(1959-2019) Japanese comics creator whose chief work, a series of interconnected tales stemming from his first professional sale, dominated his entire career, spiralling into an ungainly collection of sometimes contradictory works with major discrepancies in tone. Kujaku-Ō ["Peacock King"] (1985-1989 Young Jump) features a youthful Buddhist priest, given to indulgences in sins of the flesh, but gifted with demon-hunting powers through being the ...
Split Second
Film (1991). Challenge. Directed by Tony Maylam, Ian Sharp. Written by Gary Scott Thompson. Cast includes Alun Armstrong, Kim Cattrall, Neil Duncan, Ian Dury, Rutger Hauer, Michael J Pollard and Pete Postlethwaite. 91 minutes. Colour. / London, 2008 CE. The Thames has risen and society is crumbling. Coffee-drinking hard man Hauer and comics-reading Scots intellectual Duncan are brawling buddy cops on the trail of a heart-eating villain who carves ...
Heldon
French electronic rock band formed in 1974 by Richard Pinhas (1951- ), named after The High Land of Heldon in Norman Spinrad's novel The Iron Dream (1972); originally active until 1979, and reformed with differing line-ups occasionally since. Pinhas has said the band was inspired equally by the events of May 1968 (in which he participated), the works of Gilles Deleuze, and science fiction, especially Philip K Dick (Pinhas ...
Klaabu kosmoses
Estonian/Russian animated film (1981; vt Klaabu in Space). Tallinnfilm. Directed by Avo Paistik. Written by Avo Paistik and Enn Vetemaa. 15 minutes. Colour. / Klaabu kosmoses is the third part of a trilogy of dialogue-free shorts by Paistik. The first is Klaabu (1978; 10 minutes), where an egg is formed from a drop of water and is brooded by a passing bird: it hatches into Klaabu, a four-limbed egg with a face (and, judging from ...
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 ...