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Thursday 17 April 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for what we mean by Science Fiction; here for the masthead; here for some Statistics; here for the 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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Bennis, Robyn
(? - ) US biotech scientist and author whose Signal Airship sequence beginning with The Guns Above (2017) follows the career of a female Airship captain in a Steampunk Alternate World. The complications of her career are reminiscent of those of C S Forester's Horatio Hornblower, and though the series may ...
Peck, Richard E
(1936- ) US author and academic and university administrator, an active critic of both literature in general and sf in particular. He began publishing sf with "In Alien Waters" for Venture in November 1969. His sf novel, Final Solution (1973), is an amusing but grim tale in which a US academic is sent fifty years into the future (through Cryonics) to find universities and ...
Asteroid [tv]
US tv miniseries (1997). Davis Entertainment/NBC Studios for NBC-TV. Produced by Donna Ebbs, Phil Margo, and Christopher Morgan. Directed by Bradford May. Written by Robbyn Burger, and Scott Sturgeon. Cast includes Michael Biehn, Zachary Charles, John Lindsey, Annabella Sciorra and Anthony Zerbe. 120 minutes. Colour. / Astronomer Dr Lily McKee (Sciorra) discovers a huge Asteroid on a collision course with Earth, with the impact due in the very ...
Walker, Steve
(1956- ) UK playwright, poet, illustrator and author, initially best known for his Radio plays, almost all forty of them for the BBC, beginning with "Him and It" (October 1988 Radio 4), an exercise in Absurdist SF. Other plays of interest, several similar pushing Satire into the absurd, include "Journey to the Centre of the Earth" (28 December 1994 Radio 4), adapting the ...
Herscholt, Wolfe
An Australian pseudonym or more likely a House Name used mainly by G C Bleeck and Russell Hausfeld on some unremarkable Scientific Thrillers titles, two of them of novella length. These are Magnetic Peril (1949 chap) and X-Ray Menace (1949 chap), both involving Inventions; in the first a new metal is used to magnetically attract ocean liners (see ...
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 ...