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Sunday 7 December 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 1 December 2025
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Stoppard, Tom
Working name of Czech-born playwright and screenwriter Tomáš Straussler (1937-2025), in the UK since 1946, the Stoppard surname being acquired from his stepfather when his widowed mother remarried in 1945. His early dramatic work was characterized by extravagant wit and wordplay, and an Absurdist application of logic to surreal or insane situations. Following the broadcast of several Radio plays, his ...
Invisible Ray, The
Film (1936). Universal Pictures. Directed by Lambert Hillyer. Written by John Colton from an original story by Howard Higgins, and Donald Hodge. Cast includes Frances Drake, Boris Karloff (credited as "Karloff"), Frank Lawton and Bela Lugosi. 80 minutes. Black and white. / The brilliant Dr Janos Rukh (Karloff) has invented a Time Viewer telescope which can literally record events which ...
Xu Zhuodai
Pen-name of Xu Fulin (1880-circa 1958), who flourished as a humorist during the 1920s in the cosmopolitan Chinese city of Shanghai, gaining the sobriquet Huaji Dafu ["The Master of Laughter"]. Among his other professions, he ran a school for acrobats, was a sometime playwright and translator, dabbled in the nascent film business, and even set up a soy sauce factory. / Among his many works of film reviews, essays and short stories, Yingxixue ...
Alley Oop
US Comic strip, created and drawn by V T Hamlin from 5 December 1932 for Bonnet-Brown, a small firm which soon collapsed, then from 1933 for the NEA syndicate; Hamlin retired from the daily strip in 1968 and from the Sunday strip in 1973, when it was taken over by his assistant Dave Graue (1926-2001). Drawn in a style more comically exaggerated than usual in adventure strips, though with clear affection, Oop is a tough and likeable ...
Starling, Caitlin
(? - ) US interactive game designer and author who is of sf interest for her first novel, The Luminous Dead (2019), is set mostly Underground on a planet exploited primarily for its mineral deposits (see Colonization of Other Worlds); the protagonist, contracted to explore yet unknown cave systems for further resources, finds herself caught between the chthonic ...
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 ...