SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 8 July 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 7 July 2025
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Last Dinosaur, The
Made-for-tv film (1977). Rankin/Bass Productions-Tsuburaya Productions for ABC-TV. Produced by Jules Bass. Directed by Alexander Grasshoff, Tsugunobu Kotani (credited as Tom Kotani). Written by William Overgard. Cast includes Richard Boone, Steven Keats (Chuck Wade), Tetsu Nakamura, Luther Rackley (Bunta) and Joan Van Ark. 106 minutes, cut to 95 minutes. Colour. / Masten Thrust Jr (Boone) is a billionaire oil company owner and big-game hunter ...
Minor, John W
Pseudonym of US author George Lynde Catlin (1840-1896), who specialized in nonfiction, much of it devoted to various railways and railroads. "Bietigheim" (1886) as by John W Minor is a Future War tale set in 1890-1891 between the US and her allies and Germany and hers. Germany loses, and by 1910 republics – on the model of the United States of America – have replaced the old monarchies throughout Europe (see ...
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
Film (1970). Apjac/Twentieth Century Fox. Directed by Ted Post. Written by Paul Dehn and Mort Abrahams, based on characters created by Pierre Boulle in La planète des singes (1963; trans as Planet of the Apes 1963). Cast includes James Franciscus, Linda Harrison, Charlton Heston and Kim Hunter. 95 minutes. Colour. / In this first and best of four ...
Neville, Derek
(1911-1976) UK author of Bright Morrow (1947), a Near Future tale in which Cold-War-like conflicts gradually give way to a Utopian world. [JC]
Healy, Dominic
(? -? ) Australian author, involved in trade union activities, in whose first sf tale, The Story of a Lost Planet; Or, the Wonderful Submarine (1919 chap), the trade-union survivor of the destruction of Earth recounts these events to sympathetic auditors on Canopus. The female protagonist of his second, A Voyage to Venus (1943), after escaping the human settlement on Venus, encounters a spoof culture of ...
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 ...