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Monday 16 September 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 16 September 2024
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Quatermass II
1. UK tv serial (1955). BBC TV. Produced and directed by Rudolph Cartier. Written Nigel Kneale. Cast includes Monica Grey, Hugh Griffith, John Robinson and John Stone. Six 35-minute episodes. Black and white. / The sudden death of Reginald Tate, who played the lead in The Quatermass Experiment (1953), may account for some of the visible discomfort exuded by John Robinson, who replaced ...
Harrington, James
(1611-1677) UK political theorist and author whose The Common-Wealth of Oceana (1656), anonymous, comprises a fictionalized Utopia set in the eponymous Island; it argues for a republican government with strict separations of powers (the treatise was influential in the writing of the American Constitution) and rigorously enforced protection of the poor from their natural predators, the rich. The book was impounded by Oliver ...
McGill, Robert
(1976- ) Canadian author, active from around 2000. He is of sf interest for his third novel, A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life (2022), set in a Near Future world in which the only cure for an ongoing Pandemic is a process known as flatpacking. A diseased person's body is dehydrated, filled with a poison fluid claimed to be restorative, and the resulting flattened package sent from ...
Connolly, Roy
(1893-1966) Australian journalist and author who worked as a political journalist for the Queensland Labor Party's Daily Standard during the 1930s. While in the UK (1931-1934) he collaborated with Frank McIlraith (about whom nothing is known) on a Future War novel, Invasion from the Air: A Prophetic Novel (1934), in which London and other European capitals are destroyed from the air through the use of ...
Snyder, John
(? -? ) US author of an sf Satire, The Wind Trust: A Possible Prophecy (1903 chap), set in a grimly spoofed Near Future where a nefarious cartel, the Instamboul Corporation for the Control of the Wind, attempts to gain monopoly control over the elements – first taking ownership of the wind, then charging a royalty for breathing. As the cartel or trust begins to threaten the world ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...