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Friday 18 April 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.
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Thomas, Chauncey
(1822-1898) US author of a technocratic Utopia, The Crystal Button; Or Adventures of Paul Prognosis in the Forty-Ninth Century (1891); the text was apparently drafted in the 1870s, and only submitted for publication after the success of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), when it was edited by George Houghton (of Houghton, Mifflin and Company). The protagonist, seemingly brain-damaged in 1872, ...
Grosse Verhau, Der
Film (1970; vt The Big Mess). Kairos Film. Produced and directed by Alexander Kluge. Written by Kluge, Wolfgang Mai. Cast includes Silvia Forsthofer, Siegfried Graue, Vincenz Starr and Maria Sterr. 86 minutes. Black and white and colour. / This West German comedy is by a director – a leading light of the German New Wave – whose apprenticeship was with Fritz Lang. It is an amusing ...
Brown, Slater
(1896-1997) US author, perhaps best known as "B", E E Cummings's cellmate in his famous memoir of World War One, The Enormous Room (1922). Brown's own writing career was relatively desultory, though he published at least two books of genre interest: The Talking Skyscraper (1945) is a children's tale about a New York skyscraper dissatisfied with its (his) lot; Spaceward Bound (1955) is a ...
Davis, Mike
(1946-2022) US activist, editor, futurologist and author who is of narrow though legitimate sf interest for the Islands Mysterious Young Adult sequence beginning with Land of the Lost Mammoths: A Science Adventure (2003), whose three young protagonists while visiting Greenland are transported to a Lost World in the interior of the great Island, where they encounter Vikings, flora ...
Kaufman, Charlie
(1958- ) US screenwriter, filmmaker and author. An NYU film-school classmate of writer-director Chris Columbus, Kaufman struggled for a decade writing spec scripts for television and occasional pieces for National Lampoon, before eventually landing script work on a series of now little-remembered Television shows through the 1990s; the experience of protracted unsuccess remains an emotional centre of all of his major films. Of his ...
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 ...