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Monday 16 February 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 16 February 2026
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Loss of Feeling
Russian film (1935; vt Gibel Sensatsii; vt Loss of Sensation; vt Jim Ripple's Robot; vt Jim Ripl's Robot). Mezhrabpomfilm. Based on Idut Robotari ["The Robotariat Is Coming" or "Robots Are Coming"] (1931) by Volodymyr Vladko (see below and Ukraine). Cast includes Vladimir Gardin, Pavel Poltoratskiy, Vergiliy Renin, Nikolay Rybnikov, Sergei Vecheslov and Mariya Volgina. 86 minutes. Black and ...
Wells, Simon
(1961- ) UK animator and director, great-grandson of H G Wells and protegé of Steven Spielberg. He branched out into live action with The Time Machine (2002), and into Robert Zemeckis's performance-capture technology with Mars Needs Moms (2011), which he also co-wrote ...
Oxenham, John
Pseudonym of UK lay figure in the Congregationalist Church, poet, editor and author William Arthur Dunkerley (1852-1941); he was co-founder, with Robert Barr of The Idler. Many of his works – some of them now-unread fantasies – served to advance his religious convictions. Two novels are of sf interest: ...
Barker, Dennis
(1929-2015) UK journalist and author, active in the former capacity from the mid-1940s, much of his career being with the Guardian. Of his novels, Winston Three Three Three (1987) is of interest, being set in a distant Near Future Britain, part of a Communist Europe-spanning Russian empire half a century or so hence. The tale focuses on the eponymous Winston's search for the original Winston One through a colonized land that does not, in ...
Kellermann, Bernhard
(1879-1951) German author whose Near Future sf novel, Der Tunnel (1913; trans anon as The Tunnel 1915), describes the construction of a transatlantic tunnel (see Under the Sea) over a twenty-six year span; the future anticipated by Kellermann has no World War One, in which he served as an active foreign correspondent. Der Tunnel was ...
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 ...