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Saturday 22 January 2022
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.
Site updated on 21 January 2022
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Bridge, Ann
Pseudonym of UK author Mary Dolling O'Malley (1889-1974), active from the 1920s until the year before her death. Some supernatural fantasies are assembled in The Song in the House (coll 1936); And Then You Came (1948), a Timeslip tale, hovers Equipoisally between fantasy and sf – the slippage through time being understood in fantasy terms as a magnetically enforced coming together of first-century CE myth-coated events and their contemporary reiterations; and as sf through references to ...
Donson, Cyril
(1919-1986) UK journalist and author, at one period of his life a schoolmaster at the Royal Naval School, Tal Handaq, Malta. The generic nature of his first story – "Mouse Into Man" in Titbits Magazine in 1940 – has not been established. He claimed to have published more than 6000 pieces, fiction and nonfiction, under various names including Lonny Cordis, Russ Kidd, Via Hartford and Anita Mackin. His known sf is, however, restricted to three routine adventures for Robert Hale ...
Richards, Harvey D
Pseudonym of US military pilot and author Noël E Sainsbury Jr (1884-1956) for his Sorak sequence, beginning with Sorak of the Malay Jungle [for all subtitles see Checklist] (1934), and clearly intended to exploit the popularity of Tarzan. Sorak himself, and his animal companion (in this case, a tiger), are inherently as borderline-sf in their conception as Tarzan himself; but they venture (as does Tarzan) into sf territory, discovering a Lost Race inhabited by giants in Sorak and the ...
Betchov, Robert
(1919-1996) American academic and author, whose The Year of the Spiatnik: A Novel (1975) describes Future War and its guardedly hopeful outcome. [JC]
Looker
Film (1981). Ladd Co/Warner Bros. Directed by Michael Crichton. Written by Crichton. Cast includes James Coburn, Susan Dey, Albert Finney and Leigh Taylor-Young. 94 minutes cut to 90 minutes. Colour. / Looker was intended by Crichton as a comedy, but the studio wanted a suspense thriller, and the result falls confusingly between the two. Three models, after having undergone surgery to make them even more beautiful, are murdered, and the plastic surgeon (Finney) wonders why. Villainous ...
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 ...