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Sunday 12 April 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.
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Barrett, Geoffrey John
(1928-1999) UK author who also published thrillers as Cole Rickard and Westerns as Bill Wade; his sf novels, written for Robert Hale Limited under his own name and as Edward Leighton, Dennis Summers and James Wallace, are consistently routine; as there seems to have been no intrinsic reason for selecting these different names, Barrett's sf is listed below as a single chronology. [JC]
Body Snatchers
Film (1993). Warner Bros. Directed by Abel Ferrara. Written Stuart Gordon, Dennis Paoli and Nicholas St John, based on a story by Raymond Cistheri and Larry Cohen, based loosely in turn on the 1958 screenplay. Cast includes Gabrielle Anwar, Terry Kinney, Meg Tilly, Forest Whitaker and Billy Wirth. 87 minutes. Colour. / This low-budget remake (the second remake, the first being in 1978) of ...
Klune, TJ
(1982- ) US author, most of whose Young Adult fiction has focused on gay and LGBTQ issues; of these, the best known is probably The House in the Cerulean Sea (2020), a complex fantasy set partly on an Island inhabited by childhood imagos of various creatures of legend (see Mythology; Supernatural Creatures); the protagonist ...
Longevity in Writers
It did not yet seem remarkable in 1979, when the first edition of this encyclopedia was released, with many founding authors of Genre SF still in mid career. A few decades later, however, when the second edition appeared in 1993, it seemed appropriate to include an entry on the extreme longevity of some sf and fantasy writers and publications (for magazines and their editors see Longevity in Publications). Three decades ...
Ultravox
UK synth-pop band, who as "Ultravox!" (with exclamation mark) released a first eponymous album Ultravox! (1977). A modishly alienated work that uses synthesizers in a doomy and rather melodramatic manner, it nevertheless achieves some atmospheric moments, as in the urban noir of "Saturday Night In The City of the Dead", or the Robot-themed "I Want To Be A Machine". This last song, one of the band's early successes, situates itself in a subordinate ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...