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Friday 13 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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Hacke, Axel
(1956- ) German journalist – winner of several journalism awards – and author, active since 1981 and at book length since 1991. He is of borderline sf interest for Die kleine König Dezember (1993 chap; trans Rosemary Davidson as Little King December 2002 chap), a tale of reversed ageing (see Time in Reverse) in which the eponymous king is met as a shrinking ...
Space Stories
US Pulp magazine. Five bimonthly issues October 1952 to June 1953, published by Standard Magazines as a companion to Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories; edited by Samuel Mines. Its policy, like that of Startling Stories, was to feature a complete novel in every issue. To some degree, as Startling's contents steadily ...
Sinclair, Clive
(1948-2018) UK author best known for his first novel, Bibliosexuality (1973), which not quite fantastically describes a neurotic condition involving sexual intimacy with books, as conveyed through an ultimately indecipherable narrative liaison between the author and the conveyor or victim of excessive bibliophily (see Jorge Luis Borges; Postmodernism and SF). Hearts of Gold (coll 1979) ...
Subliminal
Subliminal Advertising and indoctrination once formed a minor focus of sf Paranoia. The technique, dating back to the 1950s, uses briefly displayed words or images intended to affect the human mind without being consciously perceived. In real life its effectiveness is debatable; it is often considered a branch of Pseudoscience, although occasional contrary reports continue to appear. Sf treatments ...
Airship Destroyer, The
Film (1909; vt The Aerial Torpedo, 1915). Charles Urban Trading Company. Directed and written by Walter R Booth. The attribution of the story to Jules Verne is false. Cast not given. 11 minutes. Black and white. / The Airship Destroyer, which merits notice as one of the first sf films, translates with some efficiency into visual terms the popular Future War ...
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 ...