SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 15 January 2025
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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Lensman
Board and counter Wargame (1969). Designed by Philip Pritchard. / Lensman is the earliest known sf Wargame to be made available commercially. Like Spacewar (1962), it was inspired by E E Smith's Lensman books. Unlike that game, and despite its lack of authorization from Smith's estate, it is intimately involved with its source material, and ...
Bernal, J D
(1901-1971) UK physicist and political philosopher, Marxist polemicist, whose The World, the Flesh and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul (1929 chap) manages, with astonishing clarity and concision, to provide models for the understanding and exploitation of the future that sf writers – some knowingly, some ignorant of this small work – would mine for decades. Its influence was acknowledged by Olaf ...
Sputnik
Russian film (2020). Sony Pictures presents an Art Pictures Studio, Hype Film and Vodorod Pictures production in association with Fond kino. Directed by Egor Abramenko. Written by Oleg Malovichko and Andrei Zolotarev. Cast includes Oksana Akinshina, Fyodor Bondarchuk, Pyotr Fyodorov and Anton Vasiliev. 113 minutes. Colour. / A cosmonaut returns from orbit in 1983 with an Alien lifeform inside him (see ...
McQueen, Ronald A
(? - ) UK author known only for several Space Operas written for Robert Hale Limited, beginning with The Cosmic Assassin (1980) [JC]
Disney on Television
Aside from a one-off special in 1950 to promote Alice in Wonderland (1951), the Walt Disney Company's involvement with Television was initially to fund and advertise Disneyland – whose opening ceremony would be broadcast on ABC, watched by 70 million people. ABC had helped fund the park in return for a television series, Walt Disney's Disneyland (1954-1958), which was followed by ...
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 ...