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Thursday 5 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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Sohl, Jerry
Working name of US author and former journalist Gerald Allan Sohl Sr (1913-2002), active from about 1950 in sf and other genres as Sohl and under various pseudonyms, including Nathan Butler and Sean Mei Sullivan. He began publishing sf with The 7th Order (March 1952 Galaxy; 2010 ebook) and soon released The Haploids (1952), the first of several 1950s novels whose slick surface and sharp economy of scale marked him as a professional ...
Geen, Eric
(? - ) UK author of an sf Satire, Tolstoy Lives at 12N B9 (1971), published at a time when in the UK residents in garden suburbs and meticulously designed exurbs were beginning to live through the downside of the knowing solicitude of the town-planners who thought the destruction wreaked by World War Two was an opportunity. Tolstoy is a boy; his residential address fixes him into a ...
Sputnik
Russian film (2020). Sony Pictures presents an Art Pictures Studio, Hype Film and Vodorod Pictures production in association with Fond kino. Directed by Egor Abramenko. Written by Oleg Malovichko and Andrei Zolotarev. Cast includes Oksana Akinshina, Fyodor Bondarchuk, Pyotr Fyodorov and Anton Vasiliev. 113 minutes. Colour. / A cosmonaut returns from orbit in 1983 with an Alien lifeform inside him (see ...
Travel Guides
These occasionally feature in sf, the most famous of all being Douglas Adams's comic creation The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (which see) – a guide that gives little space to such minor destinations as Earth, famously listed only as "Harmless" and amended after extensive further research to "Mostly harmless". In older sf, Jack Vance makes witty use of ...
Estrin, Marc
(1939- ) US cellist and author, whose first novel, Insect Dreams: The Half Life of Gregor Samsa (2002), translates the story of Samsa, from Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis (1915 chap; trans 1937), into what might be called sf: after his transformation into a giant bug, Samsa is rescued by his family's maid and sold to a circus, from which vantage he observes and manifests through his inner life the ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...