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Thursday 17 April 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 14 April 2025
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Tenkū no shiro Laputa
Japanese animated film (1986; vt Laputa: Castle in the Sky; Castle in the Sky; Laputa: The Flying Island). Studio Ghibli. Directed and written by Hayao Miyazaki. Voice cast includes Kotoe Hatsui, Mayumi Tanaka, Minori Terada and Keiko Yokozawa. 126 minutes. Colour. / This film is inspired by the flying Island of Laputa in Jonathan Swift's ...
Benson, Stella
(1892-1933) UK author who did volunteer work during World War One; her first three novels, each with some transfigured autobiographical content, are set in a wartime frame. The first, I Pose (1915) is nonfantastical. In the second, This Is the End (1917), a young woman in London creates a fantasy world to retreat to, causing relatives to scour the countryside for her; but the death in combat of her ...
Nowlan, Philip Francis
(1888-1940) US author whose first sf story, "Armageddon – 2419 A.D." (August 1928 Amazing) – published in the same issue of Amazing Stories that featured the inception of E E "Doc" Smith's Skylark saga – introduced Anthony "Buck" Rogers to the world, helping to inaugurate the reign of full-grown interstellar Space Opera in American sf. This and a ...
Collins, Robert A
(1929-2009) US scholar of science fiction who founded the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts (1980-current), and edited various critical magazines and anthologies. His first published work was Thomas Burnett Swann: A Brief Critical Biography and Annotated Bibliography (1979 chap) (see Thomas Burnett Swann). The magazines include Fantasy Review (2) for some years from 1981, ...
Patrouch, Joseph F, Jr
(1935- ) US author and critic who has written some short sf but first began to publish work of genre interest with two booklets on the sf of Isaac Asimov: Isaac Asimov's I, Robot: A Study Guide (1972 chap) and The Short Fiction of Isaac Asimov: A Study Guide (1972 chap). These were presumably spinoffs from his more substantial work The Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov (1974), completed in graduate ...
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 ...