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Saturday 8 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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Monster of Piedras Blancas, The
US film (1959). Vanwick Productions. Directed by Irvin Berwick. Written by H Haile Chace. Cast includes Frank Arvidson, Jeanne Carmen, Pete Dunn, John Harmon, Forrest Lewis, Don Sullivan and Les Tremayne. 71 minutes. Black and white. / Misanthropic widower Mr Sturges (Harmon) will angrily warn off any passers-by who get too close to his lighthouse; set on the mainland, this is but a short distance from a coastal town. Here we see a group of locals staring into a small boat, where two ...
Dorfman, Ariel
(1942- ) Argentinian-born academic, playwright, journalist and author, in Chile from early childhood, alternatingly in the US from the late 1960s; active from the late 1960s. His work as a writer has been intimately engaged with the fate of Chile from the election of Salvador Allende (1908-1973) in 1970, through his death after an America-inspired coup in 1973, and through the tumultuous years since. His work in general is nonfantastic, though the main protagonist of ...
Woodley, Sherrida
(1950- ) US author in whose Near Future sf tale Quick Fall of Light (2010) the survival of a passenger pigeon offers a chance that Homo sapiens will not succumb to a new Pandemic as devastating as the 1918 Spanish flu. [JC]
Treggiari, Jo
(1965- ) UK-born author in Canada from an early age. The Curious Misadventures of Feltus Ovalton (2006), for younger children, carries its child protagonist to various Monster-packed Parallel Worlds, more or less by Magic;the young protagonist of the Young Adult tales Ashes, Ashes (2011) survives in Central Park a ...
R H Esquire
(? -? ) Anonymous English author who produced the first Utopia to appear after the Restoration of Charles II. New Atlantis. Begun by the Lord Verulam, Viscount St Albans: And Continued by R.H. Esquire (1660), is a plausible, if less elegant, conclusion to Francis Bacon's New Atlantis: A Work Unfinished (bound in with Sylva Sylvarum 1626; 1627 chap). Picking ...
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 ...