SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 3 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.
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Sterling, George
(1869-1926) US poet and author whose reputation peaked during the first decade of the twentieth century, partly due to the fervent advocacy of Ambrose Bierce and Jack London; he is now almost entirely forgotten. The title poem of The Testimony of the Suns and Other Poems (coll 1903) is an extended essay in Cosmology whose relegation of Homo sapiens to utter insignificance ...
Shannon, Terence
(? - ) US author in whose What Happened to the Indians (2000) America is threatened with an Alien Invasion, these events prefigured by UFO landings in the 1940s; and responds more vigorously than the "Indians" did when the white man first came to the continent. A markedly right-wing pattern of argument (see Politics), presented ...
Prototype
Videogame (2009). Radical Entertainment (RE). Designed by Eric Holmes, Dennis Detwiller. Platforms: PS3, Win, XB360. / In Prototype, the hero is a Monster. In present-day Manhattan, an unknown virus is radically mutating the population, turning them into grotesque Zombie-like killers. The player's character, Alex Mercer, is a Superpowered amnesiac, a ...
Oram, John
Working name of Welsh author John Oram Thomas (1906-1992) for his two Ties in the Man from U.N.C.L.E. Television sequence (see The Man from U.N.C.L.E.), The Copenhagen Affair (1965) and The Stone-Cold Dead in the Market Affair (1966), the latter – unusually – being set in Wales. [JC]
Basilisks
The concept of pure information as a Weapon which adversely affects the mind or body is a recurring sf theme. Many authors have given this form of science-fictional spin to a notion grounded in Mythology, where the basilisk is an imaginary creature which (like Medusa and her sister Gorgons) can kill with a glance; and in Horror, where sights too dreadful to look upon are commonplace. One notable ...
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 ...