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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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Matter Transmission
The matter transmitter is one of sf's many facilitating devices for Transportation: a hypothetical machine which is not rationally plausible in terms of known science (at least at any macroscopic scale) but which is very convenient for certain narrative purposes (see Imaginary Science). By virtue of an obvious play on words, matter transmitters were sometimes called "transmats" – as in Lan Wright's "Transmat" (November 1960 Science Fiction Adventures UK) – but the contraction never ...
Punishment Park
Film (1970). Chartwell/Françoise. Directed by Peter Watkins. Written by Watkins. Cast includes Carmen Argenziano, Stan Armsted, Jim Bohan, Frederick Franklin and Gladys Golden. 89 minutes. Colour. / Set in the Near Future, Punishment Park concerns a group of young political dissidents who are forced to endure a government-controlled "run of the gauntlet" before they can attain amnesty for their political crimes. They must travel many miles across a US desert to reach a flagpole ...
Ransome, J Stafford
(1860-1931) UK engineer, cartoonist and author, who published under his own name, as by S R, and as by The "Blunderland" Cartoonist. He was responsible for the illustrations for, and possibly collaborated to some extent in the writing of, the Clara in Blunderland sequence of political Satires beginning with Clara in Blunderland (1902), whose main author Harold Begbie wrote here as Caroline Lewis, a joint pseudonym shared for this book by M H Temple (1862-1928). Ransome is of interest in his own ...
Kdo Chce Zabít Jessii
Film (1965; vt Who Would Kill Jessie?). Filmové studio Barrandov. Directed by Miloš Macourek, Václav Vorlíček. Written by Macourek, Vorlíček. Cast includes Karel Effa, Dana Medřická, Olga Schoberová, Jiří Sovák and Juraj Višný. 80 minutes. Black and white. / This very funny Czechoslovak film was conceived for children, but the makers realized that the idea had satirical potential. An overworked ...
Tall, Stephen
Pseudonym of US biology professor and author Compton Newby Crook (1908-1981), who began his writing career under various undisclosed pseudonyms in the 1930s; none of this early work, which has not been satisfactorily traced, seems to have been sf, which he began publishing as Tall with "The Lights on Precipice Peak" for Galaxy in October 1955. He did not begin to be active in the field until more than a decade later, becoming known initially for the Stardust sequence, beginning with The ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its listing of Pseudonyms. Criticized at first for its failure to annotate its findings – so that, for instance, pseudonyms used for sf could not be ...