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Friday 27 May 2022
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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Britton, David
(1945-2020) UK publisher and author, founder with Michael Butterworth of Savoy Books in 1976 in Manchester, whose early list included works by Michael Moorcock, Charles Platt and Jack Trevor Story. With Butterworth, he edited The Savoy Book (anth 1978) and Savoy Dreams (anth 1984), which attempted with some success to demonstrate the anti-establishment ethos of the house, an ethos that brought both Britton and Butterworth into conflict with the UK obscenity laws, Britton himself being jailed ...
Questor Tapes, The
Made-for-tv film (1974). Universal/NBC. Directed by Richard A Colla. Teleplay Gene Roddenberry, Gene L Coon. Cast includes Mike Farrell, Robert Foxworth and John Vernon. 100 minutes. Colour. / This was the rather good pilot episode for a Television series that never sold. Questor (Foxworth), the last of a series of Android guardians deposited on Earth aeons ago by a beneficent Alien race, has been faultily programmed, and the story involves his search for information that will explain his ...
Yourell, Agnes Bond
(1864-? ) US author whose A Manless World (1891) speculates about what might happen to the human species were an interstellar gas to have destroyed "animal desire" (see Sex; Feminism) in everyone except – it is mooted – the Jews (see Race in SF), who might find an elixir: riots and pogroms would occur; the race would vanish. In a manner not uncommon to nineteenth-century fiction of this sort, the tale is told in an "as if" mode, and claims to do no more than present ...
Pendell, Dale
(? - ) US author of a Future History, The Great Bay: Chronicles of the Collapse (2010), which begins with Near Future Climate Change accompanied by a worldwide disease that leaves a tiny portion of Homo sapiens alive on the Ruined Earth. California is dominated by a central sea, and after sixteen millennia a complex society familiar to many sf readers – based on a balkanized array of principalities and regions whose Technology remains at a medieval ...
Harben, Will N
(1858-1919) US author, most of whose work variously depicts life in the South, though at least three are detective novels featuring the sleuth Minard Hendricks. In the Year Ten Thousand (November 1892 Arena; 1917 chap) is a Utopian tale whose ancient narrator describes life in 2320, after vegetarianism fixes the Homo sapiens body, and 4051, after Telepathy fixes our souls; Immortality is eventually achieved. His sf novel, The Land of the Changing Sun (1894), is a Lost-World tale featuring an ...
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 ...