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Wednesday 6 May 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 4 May 2026
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Conway, Gerard F
(1952-2026) US author informally known as Gerry Conway who began his career in Comics, writing some non-fantastic scripts for Marvel Comics, and editing the short-lived 1973 weird fiction magazine The Haunt of Horror and writing for the 1973-1975 anthology Comic Worlds Unknown. He also worked extensively for ...
Fortress
Film (1992, but released 1993). Fortress Films/Village Roadshow Pictures/Davis Entertainment Production. Directed by Stuart Gordon. Written by Steve Feinberg, Troy Neighbors. Cast includes Jeffrey Combs, Clifton Gonzalez Gonzalez, Lincoln Kilpatrick, Christopher Lambert, Loryn Locklin, Kurtwood Smith, Tom Towles and Vernon Wells. 95 minutes. Colour. / In a Near-Future and apparently semi-fascist USA it is ...
Bambaataa, Afrika
(1957- ). US musician and performer, sometimes credited with inventing "rap" as a musical style. Bambaataa's first single "Planet Rock" (1982) sampled "Trans-Europe Express" by Kraftwerk and added Bambaataa's vocals. Blending the designedly machinic, bloodless, north-European musical style with an impassioned African-American content, though perhaps a counter-intuitive step, was a brilliant move, and proved enormously influential on ...
Octopus, The
US Pulp magazine, one issue, February/March 1939, published by Popular Publications, New York; edited by Ejler and Edith Jakobsson. The issue was confusingly designated Vol 1 #4, because it was a retitling (though not a continuation) of Western Raider magazine. Title changes were not uncommon when a publisher wished to keep mailing permits without having to reapply. The Octopus could hardly have been further removed ...
Brenner, Mayer Alan
(1956- ) US software designer and author who began to publish work of genre interest with the four-volume Dance of the Gods sequence opening with Catastrophe's Spell (1989), a moderately entertaining Sword and Sorcery venture that is at least notionally set in a Post-Holocaust future [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under ...
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 ...