SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 17 May 2024
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 15 May 2024
Sponsor of the day: Ansible Editions
Corman, Roger
(1926-2024) US film-maker, a number of whose films are sf. Born in Los Angeles, he graduated in engineering from Stanford University in 1947, and spent a period in the US Navy and a term at Oxford University before going to Hollywood, where he began to write screenplays; his first sale was Highway Dragnet (1954), a picture he coproduced. He soon formed his own company and launched his spectacularly low-budget career. From 1956 he was regularly associated with ...
Aira, César
(1949- ) Argentine academic, translator and author, extremely prolific from the early 1980s, who began to publish work of genre interest with his first story, "Drácula en su dracumóvil, Frankenstein a pie" ["Dracula in his Dracumobile, Frankenstein on Foot"] in El Cielo for September-October 1968, a journal edited by Aira and Arturo H Carrera (1948- ). Beginning with a nonfantastic novel, ...
Slipstream
Film (1989). Entertainment Film Productions. Produced by Gary Kurtz. Directed by Steven M Lisberger. Written by Tony Kayden, based on a story by Bill Bauer. Cast includes Kitty Aldridge, Eleanor David, Mark Hamill, Ben Kingsley, Bill Paxton and Bob Peck. 102 minutes. Colour. / Unspecified ecological rape has led to great earthquakes and geological changes all over the world. A strong, constant "river" of wind, the Slipstream, blows always in one direction across a scarred landscape ...
Hinz, Christopher
(1951- ) US author who made a considerable impact with the Paratwa sequence: Liege-Killer (1987) – which won the Compton Crook/Stephen Tall Memorial Award for Best First Novel – Ash Ock (1989) and The Paratwa (1991). From the first, the sequence gives off a sense of professional polish and hurry, densely packing a wide variety of 1980s adventure-sf ...
Taylor, Frank
(1894-1972) US author of House of the Hunter (1962), set in a deserted Post-Holocaust Los Angeles (see California), as an unseen entity gradually eliminates the last survivors in an isolated house. [JC]
Nicholls, Peter
(1939-2018) Australian editor and author, primarily a critic and historian of sf through his creation and editing of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction [see below]; resident in the UK 1970-1988, in Australia from 1988; worked as an academic in English literature (1962-1968, 1971-1977), scripted television documentaries, was a Harkness Fellow in Film-making (1968-1970) in the USA, worked as a publisher's editor (1982-1983), often broadcast film and book reviews on BBC Radio from 1974 and ...