SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 20 May 2025
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.
Site updated on 19 May 2025
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Who?
Film (1974; vt The Man in the Steel Mask). Hemisphere/Maclean & Co. Directed by Jack Gold. Written by John Gould (Jack Gold), based on Who? (April 1955 Fantastic Universe; exp 1958) by Algis Budrys. Cast includes Joseph Bova, Elliott Gould and Trevor Howard. 91 minutes. Colour. / Released long after being made, and publicized not at all, this taut, efficient little metaphysical thriller, ...
Duncan, David
(1913-1999) US screenwriter and author of popular fiction in several genres, perhaps as well known for his few sf novels as for any other work, though his first novel with an sf content, The Shade of Time (1946), which deals with "atomic displacement", was (as he records) accepted for publication only after Hiroshima. His books of the 1950s, more widely distributed within the sf markets and recognized as sf, have been better remembered, Dark Dominion (1954) is a ...
Rod Serling's Night Gallery
US tv series (1970-1972; vt Night Gallery). A Jack Laird Production for Universal TV/NBC. Created Rod Serling. 93 plays: the 1969 two-hour pilot had three plays; season 1, part of a mixture of dramas called Four-in-One, consisted of six 50-minute episodes containing two to three playlets; season 2, under the Rod Serling's Night Gallery title, had 23 of the same sort of 50-minute episodes; season three had 16 25-minute episodes, each ...
Brin, David
(1950- ) US author with advanced degrees in engineering and physics, who began publishing sf with his first novel, Sundiver (1980), which is also the first volume in the ongoing Uplift sequence (see Uplift), for which he remains best known: it continued with Startide Rising (1983; rev 1985) and The Uplift War (1987), the two being assembled as Earthclan (omni 1987); a further ...
Parnov, Eremei
(1935-2009) Russian scientist and author, almost all of whose sf of interest was published in collaboration with Mikhail Emtsev (whom see for details). After the partnership broke up in 1970, Parnov published some further work, like Prosnis' V Famaguste ["Wake up in Famagusta"] (1985), which mixes Eastern mysticism and Alien encounters in a formula adventure plot. Some superficial sf criticism appears in ...
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 ...