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Friday 29 September 2023
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 25 September 2023
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Shannon, John C
(? -? ) UK author of some sf interest for "The Dream of Jacques, the Anarchist" (?? Walsall Advertiser), a Future War vision involving advanced Airships and other newly developed Weapons. The tale appeared, along with some fantasies and weird fiction, in Who Shall Condemn? and Other Stories (coll 1894). Shannon's second collection, ...
Portwin, E T
(1912-2006) UK publisher and author, born Portwine (name changed legally), who sometimes wrote as by Elizabeth Portwin, his wife's name; as he normally signed his books E T Portwin, some confusion ensued. His books, which are Children's SF, begin with The Boy in the Moon (1945 chap) as by Elizabeth Portwin; of greatest interest is Death Swamp and Other Adventure Stories (coll 1946), whose title novella dramatizes the almost fatal ...
Adams, Tom
(1926-2019) US-born illustrator, printmaker and designer, in UK from early childhood; along with Richard Chopping (1917-2008), he was deeply influential in the 1960s and 1970s for creating in commercial terms an indelibly memorable marriage of surrealism and trompe l'oeil techniques (including collage), an influence mostly visible in his long succession of covers for the novels of Agatha Christie, mostly in reprint form. His influence on sf ...
Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer
Japanese animated film (1984). Kitty Films, Pierrot. Directed and written by Mamoru Oshii. Voice cast includes Takuya Fujioka, Toshio Furukawa, Fumi Hirano, Michihiro Ikemizu, Akira Kamiya, Saeko Shimazu and Machiko Washio. 99 minutes. Colour. / The second of the six films made as part of the Urusei Yatsura franchise, based on the Manga by Rumiko ...
Media Magazines
This entry lists the non-academic professional magazines and Semiprozines which focus on nonfiction about sf – especially in Cinema and Television – and which are either given full entries or otherwise discussed in the present encyclopedia. Forrest J Ackerman's Famous Monsters of Filmland is the ...
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 ...