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Tuesday 14 January 2025
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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Russell, Eric Frank
(1905-1978) UK author who used the pseudonyms Webster Craig, Duncan H Munro and Niall Wilde (also spelled Naille Wilde) on a few short stories, and borrowed Maurice G Hugi's (see Brad Kent) name for one other, "The Mechanical Mice" (January 1941 Astounding). He began publishing work of genre interest with "The Saga of Pelican West" for Astounding Science-Fiction in 1937, and he was only the second UK writer, after ...
Dunn, Katherine
(1945-2016) US author, teacher and radio personality whose third novel, Geek Love (1989), is a densely told tale of a family which breeds its own circus freaks through a kind of Genetic Engineering; in the end the book reads, however, not primarily as sf (see Equipoise), but as an extremely expert Fabulation on the primordial theme of the family romance. Dunn's novel should not be ...
Abre Los Ojos
Film (1997; vt Open Your Eyes). Directed by Alejandro Amenábar. Written by Amenábar & Mateo Gil. Cast includes Penélope Cruz, Chete Lera, Fele Martinez, Najwa Nimri and Eduardo Noriega. 117 minutes. Colour. / Playboy César's discarded girlfriend Nuria (Nimri) takes revenge by crashing their car, killing herself and leaves César (Noriega) facially disfigured; his unravelling life seems briefly repaired by his new love Sofía (Cruz) ...
Eugenics
Term denoting the modification and concentration of supposedly desirable human traits, and elimination of supposedly undesirable ones, by selective breeding programmes and/or the sterilization of the "unfit", a category from the outset almost invariably restricted to lower class men and women, the mentally ill (arbitrarily defined), "habitual" criminals, and non-whites. Inhabitants of and migrants from various late nineteenth-century European empires were also excluded from the ranks of the ...
Digest
A term used to describe a Magazine format, in contrast to, for example, Slick or Pulp, which are both larger. The format was made popular by the Reader's Digest, which first appeared in February 1922, though at that time the word "digest" meant that the magazine was presenting a selection of material from a wide range of other sources and thus making it "digestible" to the reader. The word referred to the ...
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 ...