SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 17 January 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 13 January 2025
Sponsor of the day: John Howard
Payne, Robert
(1911-1983) UK-born author, much travelled, who spent most of his later years in America, and who specialized in biography. Exceedingly prolific under a variety of names – including Richard Cargoe, John Anthony Devon, Howard Horne and Valentin Tikhonov – he wrote little fantasy or sf. The War in the Marshes (1938) as by Robert Young is an allegorical adventure rather in the mode of Rex Warner, in which a very ...
You Only Live Twice
Film (1967). Eon/United Artists. Directed by Lewis Gilbert. Written by Roald Dahl, based very loosely on You Only Live Twice (1964) by Ian Fleming. Cast includes Sean Connery, Mie Hama, Donald Pleasence, Tetsuro Tamba and Akiko Wakabayashi. 116 minutes. Colour. / Several of Fleming's James Bond novels were Technothrillers, mildly sf-oriented (though set in the ...
Infocomics
Videogame series (1988). Infocom. / The Infocomics are a line of Comics which were sold as Videogames. Their plots are fully determined in advance, but at various points the reader can switch to a different character's view of the story; multiple readings are required to follow the entire plot. While their visual design and writing are generally unimpressive, the Infocomics are of ...
Gamera
A giant prehistoric turtle who starred in a number of Monster Movies from the Daiei Studios. The first of these was Daikaijū Gamera (1965), in the entry for which are detailed also the other Gamera films. [JGr] links / Internet Movie Database
Orbit Science Fiction
US Digest-size magazine, published by Hanro Corp, New York; edited by Jules Saltman. Five issues [Fall] 1953 to November/December 1954, the first two undated. All stories were chosen by Donald A Wollheim, uncredited. Orbit Science Fiction was a middling-quality magazine that fell victim to the inundation of the market with too many sf magazines in the early 1950s. A story in the Tex Harrigan series by August ...
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 ...