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Friday 14 November 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 10 November 2025
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Amazing Stories [tv]
US tv series (1985-1987; vt Steven Spielberg's Amazing Stories). Amblin/Universal for NBC. Created by Steven Spielberg. Producers included Joshua Brand, John Falsey, David E Vogel. Writers included Spielberg, Frank Deese, Richard Christian Matheson, Mick Garris, Joseph Minion, Menno Meyjes, Michael McDowell, Paul Bartel. Directors included Spielberg, Robert ...
Signs
Film (2002). Touchstone Pictures (see The Walt Disney Company) presents a Blinding Edge Pictures/Kennedy/Marshall production. Directed by M Night Shyamalan. Written by Shyamalan. Cast includes Abigail Breslin, Rory Culkin, Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix. 106 minutes. Colour. / Superficially, Signs is an alien Invasion movie, told from the perspective of an American ...
Fallout
Videogame (1997). Black Isle Studios (BIS). Designed by Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky, Christopher Taylor. Platforms: DOS, Mac, Win. / Fallout is a Computer Role Playing Game which uses an Isometric three-dimensional perspective, set – as was its most important influence, Wasteland (1998) – in the ruins of a ...
Dung Kai-Cheung
(1967- ) Chinese author, and sometime university lecturer, who studied comparative literature at the University of Hong Kong, writing his M Phil dissertation on Marcel Proust. Strongly influenced by the Oulipo movement, Dung's work is thick with Fabulation, including evolutionary histories of non-existent species, descriptions of fantastic cities, and ...
Williams, Walter Jon
(1953- ) US author whose first works were nautical tales as by Jon Williams, beginning with The Privateer (1981), non of them fantastic. He began to publish sf with Ambassador of Progress (1984), an unexceptional novel (but see Women in SF) in which a female agent whose mission is to revive civilization makes contact with an abandoned, semi-feudal colony planet. Knight Moves (1985) describes the ...
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. He began to publish work of genre interest with an sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" in Triquarterly for Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959]; he began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and later in ...