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Sunday 22 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.
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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. ...
Mercier, Louis-Sébastien
(1740-1814) French playwright and author best known for his sixty or more plays and for his anecdotal journalism; he was active in the French Revolution, being imprisoned during the Terror. He is of interest for his exceedingly popular Proto SF tale, L'an deux mille quatre cent quarante: Rêve s'il en fût jamais (1771 Holland; trans William Hooper as Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred 1772 2vols UK; French text rev ...
Redd, David
(1946-2024) Welsh author, exclusively of short fiction, who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Way to London Town" in New Worlds for July 1966; he was intermittently active in Fandom from 1965. Never prolific, he published some three dozen stories in SF Magazines and Original Anthologies from 1966 to 2018. Two have appeared in translation as by David ...
Escape from New York
Film (1981). Avco Embassy/International Film Investors/Goldcrest. Directed by John Carpenter. Produced by Larry Franco and Debra Hill. Written by Carpenter, Nick Castle. Cast includes Adrienne Barbeau, Ernest Borgnine, Isaac Hayes, Donald Pleasence, Kurt Russell, Harry Dean Stanton and Lee Van Cleef. 99 minutes. Colour. / The idea is wonderful. In 1997 the whole of Manhattan Island (see New York) is a ...
Cendrars, Blaise
Pseudonym of Swiss-born editor, controversialist, adventurer (though his memoirs contain a great deal of fiction), poet, film maker and author Frédéric-Louis Sauser (1887-1961), in France from around 1910, signing as Blaise Cendrars from 1912; he was in active service during World War One, losing an arm in combat. His career as experimenter, agitator, constantly restless plunger into numerous genres (which he mixed), began before the War, most of ...
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 ...