SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 21 September 2024
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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Libertarian SF
A political movement (see Politics) originating in and largely confined to the USA, libertarianism is a form of anarchism – or "minarchism", the desire for an extremely limited state – which emphasizes (nonviolent) competition rather than the voluntary cooperation proposed by the older strand of anarchist thinking, as exemplified by the writings of such theorists as Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) or, in the sf field, by Ursula K ...
Fly by Night
US film (1942; vt Secrets of G32). Paramount Pictures. Directed by Robert Siodmak, brother of Curt Siodmak. Written by Jay Dratler, F Hugh Herbert, Ben Roberts and Sidney Sheldon. Cast includes Albert Bassermann, Richard Carlson, Nancy Kelly, Martin Kosleck and Miles Mander. 72 minutes. Black and white. / On a stormy night George Tieler (Kosleck) breaks out of a sanatorium by strangling a guard, whose gun he uses to force passing pathologist ...
Species
Film (1995). Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Directed by Roger Donaldson. Alien designs by H R Giger. Written by Dennis Feldman. Cast includes Marg Helgenberger, Natasha Henstridge, Ben Kingsley, Michael Madsen, Alfred Molina and Forest Whitaker. 108 minutes. Colour. / Radio transmissions from an extraterrestrial race are intercepted on Earth. They contain a DNA sequence and instructions for combining it with our own. American scientists use the data to genetically ...
Ōtomo Katsuhiro
(1954- ) Japanese Manga creator and film-maker, who became the most famous Anime director abroad in the early 1990s, largely on the basis of a single film. Like Hayao Miyazaki in the following decade, he occupied an iconic position as the face of the medium, despite conceiving much of his output in reaction to it. His comics debut, not sf, was with "Jūsei" ["Gun Report"] (August ...
Del Arroz, Jon
(? - ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Monsieur Mingle and Kris Kringle" in Naughty or Nice: A Holiday Anthology (anth 2015) edited by Jennifer Brozek. His first novel, Star Realms: Rescue Run (2016) is an adventure-oriented Space Opera tale with Military SF elements featuring a suddenly freelance female protagonist in need of a ...
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 ...