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Tuesday 21 March 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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Atomic Brain, The
Film (1963; vt Monstrosity; vt The Brain Snatchers). Cinema Ventures/Emerson Film Enterprises. Directed by Joseph Mascelli and Jack Pollexfen (uncredited). Produced by Dean Dillman Jr and Jack Pollexfen. Written by Dillman, Sue Dwiggins, Pollexfen, and Vy Russell. Special effects by Ken Strickfaden. Cast includes Judy Bamber, Marjorie Eaton, Margie Fico, Frank Fowler, Frank Gerstle, Lisa Lang and Erika Peters. Narrator: Bradford Dillman. 64 minutes. Black and white. / ...
Clarke, Arthur C
(1917-2008) UK author, resident in Sri Lanka from 1956 until his death. Born in Minehead, Somerset, after leaving school Clarke came to London in 1936 to work as a civil-servant auditor with HM Exchequer. He was active in fan circles before World War Two, through which he served (1941-1946) as a radar instructor with the RAF, rising to the rank of flight-lieutenant. After the War he entered King's College, London, in 1948 taking his BSc in physics and ...
Kellogg, Marjorie Bradley
(1946- ) US designer of theatre scenery and author who published her first three novels as by M Bradley Kellogg to avoid confusion with another Marjorie Kellogg, but from 1991 has used her full name. Her first novel, A Rumor of Angels (1983), is unexceptional, but the Lear's Daughters sequence – The Wave and the Flame (1986) and Reign of Fire (1986), both written with NASA climatologist William B Rossow and assembled ...
Identity Exchange
The two-way version of Identity Transfer (which see). Although less plausible than one-way transfer in which the victim's personality is destroyed or suppressed, such identity swaps have a satisfying narrative neatness. The exchange of bodies and resulting forced education in another's viewpoint presents opportunities for Humour, exploited in such popular novels as F Anstey's ...
Lard, Eric
(? - ) US author of some sf interest for the Equipoisal Dawn of the Construct (2022), whose protagonist, exposed to a Magic formula, finds himself via Time Travel defending humanity in various epochs and Alternate History versions of Earth's history. The main venue is a Near Future ...
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 ...