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Monday 14 July 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for what we mean by Science Fiction; here for the masthead; here for some Statistics; here for the 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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Styx
US rock band formed in Chicago in 1972, who achieved considerable success in the 1970s and early 1980s. Their sf concept album Kilroy Was Here (1983) introduced a more synth-led sound, and produced two hit singles in "Mr. Roboto" and "Don't Let It End"; but the songs are weak and overly theatrical. The story was a response to Christian anti-rock activists: The MMM (Majority for Musical Morality) has outlawed rock music, but the imprisoned singer Robert Orin Charles Kilroy (or ...
Howitt, William
(1792-1879) UK author, married to Mary Howitt (1799-1888) who was the first translator of Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. He wrote several tales classifiable as fantasies; Pantika: Or, Traditions of the Most Ancient Times (coll 1835 2vols) assembles several of these, including "Nichar, the Exile of Heaven", which describes a ...
Morris, M Marlow
(1867-? ) US author of a Utopia, No Borderland (1938) with Laura B Speer, whose protagonists, lost in the jungle, are rescued by the voice of a woman, which leads them Underground to a Lost World inhabited by the survivors of Atlantis, who have created a clement agrarian society. The protagonists realize they are reincarnations of ancients, ...
Gibson, Colin
(1933- ) New Zealand academic, advertising copywriter, hymn-writer and author whose second novel, The Pepper Leaf: An Episode (1971), is a Near-Future sf tale set in New Zealand. Fearful of nuclear catastrophe, a small group of vegetarian nudists expose themselves to survival conditions, an exercise soon made mandatory by a sudden rise in the sea level possibly caused by ...
Not of This Earth
1. Film (1957). Los Altos/Allied Artists. Produced and directed by Roger Corman. Written by Charles B Griffith, Mark Hanna. Cast includes Paul Birch, Beverly Garland, Jonathan Haze and Dick Miller. 67 minutes. Black and white. / A sombre humanoid Alien (Birch), whose dark glasses conceal blank white eyes, seeks human blood and victims to send by Matter Transmitter to his home ...
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 ...