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Wednesday 16 July 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.
Site updated on 14 July 2025
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Modern Monsters
Letter-size saddle-stapled Cinema magazine printed on newsprint-quality paper. Publisher: Prestige Publications. Four bimonthly issues, April 1966 to October/November 1966. Editors: Gunther Collins and Donald F Glut (uncredited). / A good-quality magazine which tried to imitate Famous Monsters of Filmland, although with a slightly more mature slant. Modern Monsters ran the ...
Hodgson, John
(1881-1936) UK inventor and author, whose vision of various forms of Utopia via Time Travel, The Time-Journey of Dr. Barton. An Engineering and Sociological Forecast based on Present Possibilities (1929 chap), attractively posits a world delivered from excesses of Technology by a cadre of Technocrats; The Great God WASTE (1933) is a ...
Sonne, Hans Christian
(1891-1971) Danish-born stockbroker, banker and author, in US from 1917. He is of sf interest for Enterprise Island: "Old Joe's Way" (1948), a tale for older children which begins as Prehistoric SF with Lost Race implications and evolves into a fictionalized history of the growth of capitalism. [JC]
Ghidalia, Vic
(1926-2013) US publicist for ABC TV who in his spare time co-edited eight genre Anthologies with Roger Elwood, from The Little Monsters (anth 1969) to Beware More Beasts (anth 1975). He was also the solo editor of several further anthologies published from 1971 to 1977, as detailed in the Checklist below. [JC/DRL]
Death Ray, The
Russian silent film (1925; original title Luch Smerti). Goskino, Directed by Lev Kuleshov. Written by Vsevolod Pudovkin. Cast includes Vladimir Fogel, Aleksandra Khokhlova, Sergei Komarov, Leonid Obolensky, Porfiri Podobed, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Anya Stravinskaya. 125 minutes (but some of the film is missing, most notably the ending). Black and white. / Somewhere in the West a rebellion by factory workers has been crushed, with many killed. Then we ...
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 ...