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Monday 16 May 2022
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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Gosse, Edmund
(1849-1928) UK scholar and critic, best known for his initially anonymous autobiography, Father and Son (1907); exceedingly prolific as a reviewer and belletrist for many years. Of sf interest is his novel, The Secret of Narcisse: A Romance (1892), set in the sixteenth century in the French town of Bar-le-Duc, where the protagonist, a sculptor, manufactures (see Inventions) a Robot which much resembles a skeleton, and which causes him to be denounced (and condemned) for practising Black Magic. ...
Storm Watch
Film (2002; vt Code Hunter, Virtual Storm). Cinetel Films Inc. Directed by Terry Cunningham. Written by Cunningham, Flavia Carrozzi. Cast includes Ling Bai, Nick Cornish, Vanessa Marcil and Adrian Paul. 96 minutes. Colour. / An AI (Paul) capable of controlling the weather (see Weather Control) via satellites gets loose and decides to destroy civilization. It is foiled by a clever hacker and games player (Cornish) and his friends. / Storm Watch is a reasonably competent piece of genre ...
Vian, Boris
(1920-1959) French engineer, translator, jazz trumpeter, singer songwriter, playwright and author, his copious collected works amounting to more than fifty volumes; he was Transcendental Satrap of the Collège de 'Pataphysique, and a fine dramatist of the absurd (see Fabulation) who will be perhaps best remembered for his eloquent advocacy of American jazz, for his 400 songs (see Music) and for such plays as Équarrissage pour tous (1950; trans Simon Watson Taylor as The Knacker's ...
Lively, Adam
(1961- ) UK author, son of Penelope Lively (1931- ) [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below], in whose first novel, Blue Fruit (1988), an eighteenth-century traveller in the Far East takes ship back to an Alternate World version of twentieth-century America, though the new world makes little impression on him (see Mainstream Writers of SF), as his letters demonstrate. The Burnt House (1989) contains many references to sf, but is not in ...
Gale, Floyd C
(1918-1997) Working name of Floyd C Gold, US critic and author, the brother of H L Gold. He began to publish work of genre interest with "Treachery on Planetoid 41" for Amazing in June 1940, a tale of two astronauts shipwrecked on an Asteroid with insufficient supplies to support both before rescue. He began writing the "Galaxy's Five Star Shelf" book review column for Galaxy in November 1955 and continued until 1963, reviewing hundreds of books, both science fiction and science fact. His ...
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 ...