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Wednesday 17 August 2022
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.
Site updated on 17 August 2022
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Smith, W T F
(? -? ) US medical doctor, journalist and author of the lightly fictionalized The Trust Trusted (1906), apparently written as early as 1904, in which a new American president helps transform his land into a Utopia with common ownership of capital. [JC]
Carolina Cannonball
Film (1955). Republic Pictures. Associate Producer: Sidney Picker. Directed by Charles Lamont. Written by Barry Shipman from a story by Frank Gill Jr. Cast includes Leon Askin, Judy Canova, Andy Clyde, Ross Elliott, Jack Kruschen and Sig Ruman. 73 minutes. Black and white. / In the ghost town of Roaring Gulch, Nevada, Judy (herself) and her grandfather Rutherford Canova (Clyde) are the only remaining residents. Nevertheless they maintain the Carolina Cannonball, a trolley train, in part ...
Austria
Austrian literature must be considered a part of the larger German literature (see Germany), although with a distinct voice; Austrian writers have always been published more by German publishing houses than by Austrian ones. / At the turn of the century, Vienna was a veritable laboratory for many of the ideas of modern times, from psychoanalysis and logical positivism to music, the arts and literature: here were found Freud, Wittgenstein, Mahler, Schönberg, Klimt, Schiele, Schnitzler, ...
Cryogenics
From a Greek root meaning "cold-producing", this word is used in Physics to mean the production of extremely low temperatures and the study of phenomena at those temperatures. The shorter word Cryonics was more commonly used in sf Terminology when – as is usual – it is people or other living organic materials that are frozen. This short version has since been adopted for real-world freezing of corpses in hope of future revival. [PN] see also: Corpsicle. /
Lowachee, Karin
(? - ) Guyana-born author, in Canada from an early age, whose Warchild sequence, comprising Warchild (2002), Burndive (2003) and Cagebird (2005), set in a moderately baroque interstellar Space Opera venue, where a troubled and tradition-bound polity under the control of Earth vies with an Alien race, as seen through the difficult lives of various young men whose intersecting careers – on pirate Spaceships and Terraformed planets and other locations ...
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 ...