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Thursday 5 December 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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Stead, Rebecca
(1968- ) US author whose Young Adult novels of sf interest include First Light (2007), where a boy, visiting Greenland with his scientist father to measure global warming (see Climate Change) meets a young Culture Hero woman from an Underground Utopia who wants to lead her people back into the light; and When You Reach Me ...
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
1. Film (1961). Windsor Productions/Twentieth Century Fox. Directed by Irwin Allen. Written by Allen and Charles Bennett. Cast includes Barbara Eden, Joan Fontaine, Peter Lorre, Walter Pidgeon and Robert Sterling. 105 minutes. Colour. / The crew of a glass-nosed nuclear submarine has a mission to fire an atomic missile into the Van Allen belts, which have been set on fire by meteors (!) and are melting the icecaps. Despite enemy submarines, a ...
Moffitt, Donald
(1931-2014) US author who started publishing work of genre interest with "The Devil's Due" for Fantastic in May 1960. His first outright sf novel is The Jupiter Theft (1977), a tale which established him as an author of numerate, physics-oriented, fast-moving Hard-SF adventures (see Jupiter). After some years of silence came the Genesis series – The Genesis Quest (1986) ...
Contact [2]
Russian animated film (1978; original title Kontakt). Soyuzmultfilm. Directed by Vladimir Tarasov. Written by Alexander Kostinsky. 10 minutes. Colour. / An artist wandering the countryside rests by a lake: as he hums to himself, a Spaceship arrives. Its pilot – a Shapeshifting fluorescent triangle-eyed slug-like ...
Romero, George A
(1940-2017) US film-maker. A maverick working out of Pittsburgh rather than Hollywood, Romero changed the face of the Horror-movie genre with Night of the Living Dead (1968), an apocalyptic Zombie nightmare – its theme perhaps derived from Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (1954) – in which the dead inexplicably return to ...
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 ...