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Monday 13 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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Manson, Marilyn
US rock singer, born Bryan Hugh Warner (1969- ), probably better known for his calculatedly outrageous offstage behaviour then his music, though he has numerous devoted followers. His eponymous band's album Mechanical Animals (1998) is a Ziggy Stardust-style concept album about an Alien who is captured on Earth, and turned into a Drug-addled rock star. In tandem with the Bowie-inspired theme, the music ...
Wold Newton Family
A literary conceit or retrospective Shared World devised by Philip José Farmer as what might be called a Grand Unified Theory of numerous fictional characters, several of them Icons and/or Superheroes. The premise is that the real-world meteorite that fell near Wold Newton, Yorkshire, in December 1795 was a source of ...
Knowing
Film (2009). Summit Entertainment presents an Escape Artists in association with Mystery Clock Cinema/Goldcrest Pictures/Kaplan-Perrone Entertainment/Wintergreen Productions production. Directed by Alex Proyas. Written by Ryne Douglas Pearson and Juliet Snowden & Stiles White; story by Pearson. Cast includes Rose Byrne, Nicolas Cage, Chandler Canterbury and Lara Robinson. 121 minutes. Colour. / An MIT ...
Stoneham, C T
(1895-1965) Indian-born author, educated in the UK and in active service during World War One, living much of his adult life in Kenya and South Africa; he wrote some mysteries and Westerns as by Norgrove Thurley. Of his fiction, much of which was set in Africa and featured animals both native and imported; his extremely numerous stories for the London Evening News between 1933 and 1964 usually focused on animals in the wild. ...
Sturgeon, Theodore
(1918-1985) Working name of US author born Edward Hamilton Waldo in New York City, later adopting his stepfather's surname and taking on a new first name; Argyll (1993 chap) prints a long anguished letter Sturgeon wrote to his stepfather, plus an autobiographical essay from 1965, both of which more than confirm the hints of emotional turmoil implied by these name changes; partner of Jayne Tannehill 1976-1985. Certainly Sturgeon early suffered or ...
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 ...