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Thursday 9 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.
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Auster, Paul
(1947-2024) US translator, screenwriter and author, active from around 1970, who came to sudden attention – after years of unrecognized work, culminating in an undemanding Baseball mystery, Squeeze Play (1984) as by Paul Benjamin – with a series of Fabulations playing on detective genres and the French nouveau roman. City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and ...
Science Fantasy
In the Terminology of sf readers, and more especially publishers, this term in its usual sense of something distinct or partly distinct from science fiction has never been clearly defined, though Joseph M Crawford, James J Donahue and Donald M Grant, in their "333": A Bibliography of the Science-Fantasy Novel (1953 chap), attempted without much luck to establish it as an umbrella term covering sf and fantasy. In ...
Morris, Desmond
(1928- ) UK painter, zoologist and author who remains best known for popularizations of sociobiology, arguing in The Naked Ape: A Zoologist's Study of the Human Animal (1967) that human behaviour could be usefully studied (though not comprehensively defined) through ethological comparisons with our primate relatives. He is of some sf interest for his only novel, Inrock (1983; exp 2013), whose young protagonist enters a surreal ...
FLCL
Japanese animated OVA (2000-2001). Gainax / Production I.G / Star Child Recording. Producers: Masatoshi Nishizawa, Hiroki Sato and Masanobu Sato. Writers: Yoji Enokido and Kazuya Tsurumaki. Directors include Kazuya Tsurumaki. Voice cast includes Izumi Kasagi, Jun Mizuki and Mayumi Shintani. Six episodes of approximately 25 minutes. Colour. / Twelve year old Naota Nandaba (Mizuki) lives in the town of Mabase, whose skyline is ...
Oram, Neil
(1938- ) UK author whose involvement in sf was restricted to the three volumes of his The Warp sequence of metaphysical adventures – The Storm's Howling Through Tiflis (1980), Lemmings on the Edge (1981) and The Balustrade Paradox (1982) – which novelize his 22-hour, ten-play cycle, The Warp, performed in London in 1979, directed by Ken Campbell (1941-2008). The sequence, after the manner of the ...
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 ...