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Saturday 14 March 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.
Site updated on 9 March 2026
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Russell, John [2]
(1792-1878) UK politician and author, Prime-Minister of Great Britain 1846-1852, and 1865-1866, grandfather of Bertrand Russell; from his early writing career, the title novella assembled in Adventures in the Moon and Other Worlds (coll 1836) features a trip by mechanical Spaceship to the Moon, where a mélange of figures from various narrative traditions can be found, including ...
Angry Red Planet, The
Film (1959; vt Invasion of Mars). American International/Sino Films. Directed by Ib Melchior. Written by Melchior and Sidney W Pink; story by Pink. Cast includes Naura Hayden, Jack Kruschen, Gerald Mohr and Les Tremayne. 83 minutes. Colour. / The first manned expedition to Mars returns to Earth with two crew members dead; a third, Colonel Tom O'Bannion (Mohr) clinging to life while afflicted by a mysterious ailment; and ...
Birkenhead, The Earl of
Title and working name of UK lawyer, politician and author Frederick Edwin Smith (1872-1930), an upwardly-mobile, hugely energetic and ambitious Tory, the kind of figure who informs much of the work of John Buchan and who dies (in Buchan's work and in life) from overwork; he was ennobled upon becoming Lord Chancellor in 1919. He is of sf interest for the surprising combination of sober prescience and tomfoolery in the nonfiction 100 Years from Now ... ...
Face of Fu Manchu, The
Film (1965). Anglo-Amalgamated. Directed by Don Sharp. Written by Harry Alan Towers, based on the characters created by Sax Rohmer. Cast includes Tsai Chin, Nigel Green, James Robertson Justice, Christopher Lee and Howard Marion-Crawford. 96 minutes. Colour. / The first of a series of films produced by Harry Alan Towers in which Christopher Lee (1922-2015) portrayed the oriental master-fiend, Tsai Chin played Fu's insidious daughter (renamed Lin Tang ...
Trumbull, Douglas
(1942-2022) American cinematic special effects expert and film director. Originally he trained as an architect but while still at college switched his interest to graphic arts. After working with advertising agencies as a technical illustrator, he was hired by Graphic Films, a Hollywood company, to work on animated promotional films for NASA and the USAF. One of these films, the Cinerama Space Documentary To the Moon and Beyond (1964), was ...
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 ...