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Friday 20 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.
Site updated on 16 June 2025
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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. ...
Sun
The Sun, as the energy-source which permits life to exist on Earth, was widely worshipped in the ancient world. After the Copernican Revolution it became the hub of the Universe, but with the advent of a broader view of the cosmos it lost some of its prestige. Scientists, philosophers and Proto SF authors such as Athanasius Kircher thought it likely to be inhabited, a view which persisted until as late as 1795. Even in the ...
Foote, Bud
(1930-2005) US scholar, political activist and music enthusiast; Professor Emeritus at the Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Literature, Communication and Culture from 1957-1999 and co-ordinator of one of the first university-level sf courses in America. He is the author of The Connecticut Yankee in the Twentieth Century: Travel to the Past in Science Fiction (1991), which argues that Mark Twain's ...
J J J
Pseudonym of the unidentified UK author (? - ) of The Blue Shirts (1926), a Near Future political thriller in which the eponymous para-legal cadre attempts to create a Socialist Republic of Great Britain. Several separate Fascist organizations, each known as The Blue Shirts, were founded in or around 1932 in China, Ireland, Portugal; members of the Parti national social chrétien in mid-1930s ...
Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend
Film (1985; vt Dinosaur ... Secret of the Lost Legend). Touchstone Pictures (see The Walt Disney Company), Buena Vista Distribution. Produced by Jonathan T Taplin and Roger Spottiswood. Directed by Bill L Norton (credited as B W L Norton). Written by Clifford and Ellen Greene, based on the juvenile storybook by David Lee Miller. Cast includes William Katt, Patrick McGoohan and Sean Young. 95 minutes. Colour. / Two young married ...
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 ...