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Saturday 21 September 2024
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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Riders to the Stars
Film (1954). Ivan Tors/United Artists. Directed by Richard Carlson. Written by Curt Siodmak. Cast includes Richard Carlson, Martha Hyer, William Lundigan and Herbert Marshall. 81 minutes. Colour. / Granted, the premise behind this film is absurd – that a safe passage through Earth's atmosphere requires some sort of mysterious coating, found only on meteors, requiring scientists to dispatch astronauts into space in order to scoop up meteors that ...
Guha, Anton-Andreas
(1937-2010) German journalist and author whose sf novel, Ende: Tagebuch aus dem Dritten Weltkrieg (1983; trans Fred Taylor as Ende: A Diary of the Third World War 1986), provides, as its title indicates, a Near Future vision of the terminal horrors of World War Three as the End of the World approaches Germany; the tale is told from an ...
McMullen, Sean
(1948- ) Australian author whose first professional sf sale was "The Pharaoh's Airship" in Omega Science Digest for July/August 1986. Some of the best of his craftsmanlike stories, several of them involving Time Travel, appear in Call to the Edge (coll 1992), a notable example being "The Colours of the Masters" (March 1988 F&SF), in which a nineteenth-century ...
King and the Mockingbird, The
French animated film (1980). Original title Le Roi et l'Oiseau. Les Films Paul Grimault, Les Films Gibé, Antenne 2. Directed by Paul Grimault. Written by Paul Grimault and Jacques Prévert. Voice cast includes Jean Martin, Pascal Mazzotti, Renaud Marx and Agnès Viala. 87 minutes. Colour. / Begun in 1948 as an adaption of Hans Christian Andersen's The Shepherdess and the Chimneysweep (original title Hyrdinden Og Skorstensfejeren in ...
At the Earth's Core
Film (1976). Amicus, American International Pictures. Directed by Kevin Connor. Written by Milton Subotsky, based on At the Earth's Core (4-25 April 1914 All-Story Weekly; 1922) by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Cast includes Peter Cushing, Doug McClure and Caroline Munro. 89 minutes. Colour. / The success of Amicus's 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 ...