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Tuesday 11 February 2025
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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Tower Comics
The Comics imprint of Tower Books, active from 1965 to 1969, originally edited by Wally Wood. Wood found himself unable to handle the workload alone and brought in veteran comics writer Samm Schwartz (1920-1997) to help with all titles except his own. Wood had been promised a great deal of creative control and a large budget for the line, which included teen titles, war comics, and Superhero titles. It ...
Payne, Nick
(1984- ) UK screenwriter and playwright, most of whose dramas pithily compress sometimes transgressive content into stageable form, several of them applying speculative neuroscience to questions of Identity. In some of his work, worlds of discourse hover on the indeterminate boundaries of Fantastika, as in If There Is I Haven't Found It Yet (performed 22 October 2009 Bush Theatre, London; 2013 ...
Millard, Joseph
(1908-1989) US author in several genres who began publishing sf with "The Crystal Invaders" for Thrilling Wonder Stories in January 1941, and was active in the field for a few years, a period which included the magazine release of his only novel, The Gods Hate Kansas (November 1941 Startling; rev 1964), a routine adventure involving manipulation of humans by Aliens. It was filmed, dreadfully, ...
Keehn, Michael
(? - ) US real-estate agent and author of Waffled (1997), in which a drugged fisherman trolls in inter-Dimensional waters, where he finds Aliens bent on conquering Earth. [JC]
Kincaid, Paul
(1952- ) UK critic, award administrator and author; partner of Maureen Kincaid Speller from 1986 until her death in 2022 (they married in 1993). After an early sale to New Writings in SF which remains unpublished because the series ended, his first short story, "The Second Coming" appeared in a semi-professional magazine, Orbis, in 1984. His first fully professional publication was ...
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 ...