SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 11 December 2024
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 9 December 2024
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Life Returns
Film (1935). Scienart Pictures/Universal Pictures. Produced by Lou L Ostrow. Directed by Eugene Frenke and James P Hogan (not the sf author). Written by L Wolfe Gilbert, John F Goodrich, Arthur T Horman and Mary McCarthy, from a story by Hogan. Cast includes George P Breakston, Valerie Hobson, Onslow Stevens and Lois Wilson. 63 minutes, sometimes cut to 60 minutes. Black and white. / Dr John Kendrick (Stevens) has spent his life working on a method of reviving the dead (see ...
Masters of the Universe
Film (1987). Cannon. Directed by Gary Goddard. Written by David Odell. Cast includes Billy Barty, Meg Foster, Frank Langella and Dolph Lundgren. 106 minutes. Colour. / Goddard's unfortunate film debut announced itself as the first live-action film to be based on Toys – the He-Man toys made by Mattel; its obvious predecessor was an animated Television series, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe ...
Graphic Novel
To speak of the graphic novel is to speak of a particular kind of Comic book – usually a book-length work in the comics format published in a non-periodical format – but to do so is to risk applying what has become a marketing term to questions of definition, transforming a practical distinction into what looks superficially like a separate genre. In 2004, in response to the widespread misunderstanding of the implications of the term, the artist and ...
Neufeld, John
(1938-2021) US author, mostly for Young Adult readers, beginning with Edgar Allan (1968). He is of sf interest for Sleep, Two, Three, Four! (1971), a highly politicized Near Future Dystopia dominated by "Nixon and Company", and featuring the attempts of a group of teenagers to transcend their conditioning – the model of George ...
Thorburn, S S
(1844-1924) Scottish commissioner in the Indian Civil Service and author whose sf novel, His Majesty's Greatest Subject (1897), begins with a Ruritanian premise – the protagonist supplants his twin brother as Viceroy of India – but soon shifts into a tale of the Near Future in which the usurper saves India from radicals of every stripe, and instrumental in turning back a Franco-Russian ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...