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Tuesday 17 February 2026
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 16 February 2026
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Andromeda Strain, The
Film (1971). Universal. Directed by Robert Wise. Written by Nelson Gidding, based on The Andromeda Strain (1969) by Michael Crichton. Cast includes Arthur Hill, James Olson, Kate Reid and David Wayne. 130 minutes. Colour. / This film, whose director had in 1951 made the classic sf film The Day the Earth Stood Still, concerns a microscopic ...
White, Andrew Joseph
(? - ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Chokechain" in Transcendent 4: The Year's Best Transgender Speculative Fiction (anth 2019) edited by Bogi Takács. His first novel, the Young Adult Hell Followed with Us (2022), deftly conjoins a plot structure from the SF Megatext with a narrative dealing with complex ...
Moscoe, Mike
(1947- ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Summer Hopes – Winter Dreams" in Analog for March 1991, but who has since concentrated mainly on series, sometimes as by Mike Shepherd, beginning with the Lost Millennium sequence comprising First Dawn (1996) Second Fire (1997) and Lost Days (1998), whose protagonists arrive via Time Travel ...
Lewin, Leonard C
(1916-1999) US author of an sf Satire – a Parody published in the shape of a spoof dissertation, Report from Iron Mountain: On the Possibility and Desirability of Peace (1967) – which presents the conclusions of a US Government commission formed to consider the economic and political threat of world peace. In a tone of cunningly egregious Realpolitik, the commission urges that the world be kept on a continual ...
Plater, Alan
(1935-2010) UK Television screenwriter and playwright, extremely prolific from the early 1960s until his death; he is of sf interest for his 1988 television version of Chris Mullin's Near Future A Very British Coup (1982), in which America subverts a left-leaning UK government (see Politics). The novel ends with the morally ambiguous forced resignation of ...
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 ...