SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 9 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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Laski, Marghanita
(1915-1988) UK playwright and author, born Esther Pearl Laski (she never used her original given names); between 1958 and 1986 she was one of the most prolific contributors of material to the Oxford English Dictionary, supplying over 250,000 quotations to help establish historical usage patterns for words to be defined. Though she was not an avowed author of sf, her first novel, Love on the Supertax (1944), borders on sf in its Satirical depiction ...
Malato, Charles
(1857-1938) French anarchist, journalist and author, deported at age seventeen to New Caledonia with his father, the latter having been involved in the 1871 Paris Commune. Malato himself, back in France from 1881, espoused in Philosophie de l'anarche ["The Philosophy of Anarchy"] (1897) and agitated for a form of libertarian communism. The transgressive implications of his Lost World novel Perdu au Maroc ["Lost in Morocco"] (1915) ...
Transfer
Film (1966). Co-produced, directed and written by David Cronenberg. Cast includes Rafe Macpherson and Mort Ritts. 7 minutes. Colour. / This 16mm short film, the first-ever by David Cronenberg and produced on a shoestring while the Canadian auteur studied English Literature and Linguistics at the University of Toronto, is notable more for the thematic foreshadowing of later ...
Posteritas
Pseudonym of the unidentified UK author (? -? ) of The Siege of London (1885 chap), a Battle of Dorking tale in which an incoherent Liberal government in Britain destabilizes the country and gives France the opportunity to mount a successful Invasion, climaxes in the surrender of London and the disintegration of the British Empire. [JC]
Heller, Peter
(1959- ) US journalist and author whose first four books are nonfiction adventures mostly dealing with expeditions to various extremities of the planet; his first novel, The Dog Stars (2012), is set in a Near Future America devastated by a flu-based Pandemic and finished off by an auto-immune disorder. The protagonist, who is a pilot, lies low near Denver with a ...
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 ...