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Thursday 9 February 2023
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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Horner, Donald W
(1874-1944) UK astronomer, meteorologist and author who specialized in popular-science texts. Though published as boys' fiction, By Aeroplane to the Sun: Being the Adventures of a Daring Aviator and his Friends (1910) offers a numerate and complex vision of a high-tech Near Future, featuring picturephones, television and electric cars, and describing the protagonists' usual tour of the Solar System with prescient realism, though the inhabitants of ...
Pythagorolunister
Pseudonym of the author (? - ), possibly John Kirkby, of a Proto SF text involving Space Flight, Journey to the World in the Moon: A Dream, Containing an Historical Relation, (as received from a Lunar Philosopher) from above a Hundred Years last past, to the present Time, of the most Material Occurrences, as to the Religion, Politics ...
Ellis, D E
(1926-2001) UK author briefly active in the early 1960s with "Stress" for New Worlds in September 1961 and the routine A Thousand Ages (1961; vt Space Voyage 1973). [JC]
Falls, The
Film (1980). British Film Institute. Directed by Peter Greenaway. Written by Greenaway. 187 minutes. Colour. / Perhaps the most elliptical Disaster in sf Cinema, the Violent Unknown Event (VUE) has killed an unspecified number of people and afflicted 19 million others with bizarre symptoms including physical mutation (see Mutants), recurring dreams of water, sexual quadromorphism, the spontaneous ...
Carter, Raphael
(? - ) US author, female, of whom little is known beyond her authorship of an sf novel, The Fortunate Fall (1996), which – though its basic premise derives from D G Compton's The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe (1974; rev vt The Unsleeping Eye 1974; vt Death Watch 1981) – intensely presents a Cyberpunk world two centuries ...
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 ...