SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 14 January 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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Octaman
Film (1971). Filmers Guild/Heritage Enterprises Inc (re-release). Produced by Michael Kraike. Directed by Harry Essex. Written by Essex. Octaman costume designed by Rick Baker and Doug Beswick. Cast includes Pier Angeli, David Essex, Kerwin Mathews, Read Morgan and Jess Morrow. 76 minutes. Colour. / An expedition to a remote Mexican fishing village, led by Dr Rick Torres (Mathews) and Susan Lowry (Angeli) along with their friend Dr John Willard (Morrow), discovers dangerous amounts ...
Silver Screen Horror
Letter-size saddle-stapled Cinema magazine printed on newsprint paper. Published by Robert C Sproul as Globe Communications. No editor named. One issue, May 1977. / This magazine, apparently intended as a one-time only publication, included many black and white photos from vintage Horror and sf films, with brief articles about them. Featured productions include The Fly (1958), ...
Boye, Karin
(1900-1941) Swedish poet and author, whose first-hand experience of the fall of Weimar Germany during 1932-1934 directly influenced the work for which she is best-known by English-language readers, the Dystopia Kallocain (1940; trans Gustav Lannestock 1966), one of the several great dystopias set in a dreaded Near Future to have appeared in the decades-long aftermath of ...
Konkevič, Alexsandr
(1842-?1917) Russian author whose Future War tale, Krejsev "Russkaja Nadežda" (1886 Russkoje Sudohodstvo; 1887; trans Charles James Cooke as The "Russia's Hope"; Or, Britannia No Longer Rules the Waves: Showing How the Muscovite Bear Got at the British Whale 1888) as A K, shows the Russian navy rapidly wiping out the British navy, aided by an advanced Weapon in the form of a fast and accurate ...
Deutsch, A J
(1918-1969) US astronomer – after whom the crater Deutsch on the far side of the Moon is named – and author of the single much-anthologized story "A Subway Named Möbius" (December 1950 Astounding). Here the eponymous Transportation system – the Boston MTA (as it then was) Underground railway – develops such a high degree of topological complexity ...
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 ...