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Wednesday 19 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.
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Champetier, Joël
(1957-2015) French-Canadian author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Le Chemin des Fleurs" ["The Way of the Flowers"] for Solaris in 1981, and who published several sf and fantasy novels of interest in French from 1990. La Taupe et le Dragon (1990; rev 1999; trans Jean-Louis Trudel as The Dragon's Eye 1999) is set on a colony world founded and run by Chinese from a Hong Kong-like enclave; the complex plot – involving Earth attempts to control rebellious elements in the ...
Gamow, George
(1904-1968) Russian physicist born Georgiy Antonovich Gamov, involved in the development of quantum theory at Göttingen and later a colleague of Niels Bohr (1885-1962) and Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937). He defected in 1934 to the US, working from that year at George Washington University, where he eventually held the chair of theoretical physics; he became a US citizen in 1940, but was barred from the Manhattan Project, presumably as a security risk. After important work on stellar ...
Brown, Reynold
(1917-1991) US commercial artist who worked as a cartoonist early in his career, and also illustrated magazines in the post-World War Two years. He began creating film poster art around 1950 and was quite prolific in this area, producing dozens of posters for Cinema on into the 1960s. Many of the films concerned were sf or horror, including The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), This Island Earth (1955), I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), Attack of the 50 ...
Hauser's Memory
Made-for-tv film (1970). Universal/NBC TV. Directed by Boris Sagal. Written by Adrian Spies, based on Hauser's Memory (1968) by Curt Siodmak. Cast includes David McCallum, Leslie Nielsen, Lilli Palmer, Susan Strasberg and Robert Webber. 100 minutes. Colour. / Siodmak's 1968 novel is an updated but equally absurd variation on the theme of his novel Donovan's Brain (1943), which was filmed three times (see Donovan's Brain; The Lady and the Monster; Vengeance): a dead man's mind somehow exerts ...
Mitchell, J Leslie
(1901-1935) Scottish journalist and author, active from around 1917; too young for World War One, he spent a taxing aftermath decade (1919-1929) in active service; known also for nonfantastic Scottish novels written as by Lewis Grassic Gibbon and the nonfiction Scottish Scene; Or, the Intelligent Man's Guide to Albion (1934), also as by Gibbon, with Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978). Under his own name he wrote popular archaeology and some speculative works, including Hanno; Or, the Future of ...
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 ...