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Thursday 27 August 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.
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Rollo, William
(? - ) UK author of The Big Wheel (1984), a Near Future Technothriller set in near space, where the Big Wheel Space Station is a US strategic command centre in geosynchronous orbit, rivalled by the USSR's Astrogorodok on the far side of Earth. Escalating ecological Disaster (driven chiefly by ...
Quintet
Film (1979). Lion's Gate/Twentieth Century Fox. Directed by Robert Altman. Written by Frank Barhydt, Altman, Patricia Resnick, from a story by Altman, Lionel Chetwynd, Resnick. Cast includes Bibi Andersson, Brigitte Fossey, Vittorio Gassman, David Langton, Paul Newman, Fernando Rey and Nina Van Pallandt. 118 minutes. Colour. / This strange film, critically crucified on release, is perhaps better than the then-consensus suggested. Newman is the ...
Out of This World
1. US tv series (1952). ABC TV. Produced by Milton Kaye. Narrated by Jackson Beck. One season of 25-minute episodes. Black and white. / Out of this World hovered between sf and lectures on science. In episode three, for example, directed by Milton Kaye and written by Robbie Robertson, we see a young couple in 1993 going to the Moon for a vacation and then telephoning their relations on Earth to give impressions of their holiday. Between these ...
Harvey, M Elayn
(1945- ) US author whose sf novel, Warhaven (1987), the first volume of an incomplete Young Adult trilogy, puts its young protagonist through a series of trials, at the end of which he has clearly prepared himself to become one of the Guardians who covertly supervise a variety of spacefaring races (see Cultural Engineering; Secret Masters; ...
Rowe, Rebecca
(1965- ) US author whose first novel, Forbidden Cargo (2006), energetically develops from a moderately complex premise: on a Terraformed Mars, illegal Genetic Engineering has created a group of modified humans known as the Imagofas, who cope better with the new worlds in view that unmodified Homo sapiens and who are therefore hunted down (see ...
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 ...