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Thursday 23 March 2023
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.
Site updated on 23 March 2023
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Brown, Eric
(1960-2023) UK author who began publishing sf – after a children's play, Noel's Ark (1982 chap) – with "Krash-Bangg Joe and the Pineal-Zen Equation" for Interzone in Autumn 1987; like several further tales assembled in The Time-Lapsed Man and Other Stories (coll 1990), it is set in a future world dominated by the effects of bio-engineering and dense with information. This marriage of Cordwainer ...
Night Slaves
US made-for-tv film (1970). Bing Crosby Productions for ABC-TV. Produced by Everett Chambers. Directed by Ted Post. Written by Chambers, Robert Specht, based on Night Slaves (1961) by Jerry Sohl. Cast includes James Franciscus, Lee Grant, Leslie Nielsen, Andrew Prine and Tisha Sterling. 72 minutes. Colour. / Clay Howard (Franciscus) and Marjorie Howard (Grant) are a couple having some marriage problems as the film begins; they soon find ...
von Däniken, Erich
(1935- ) Swiss author of a series of purportedly nonfiction books, beginning with Erinnerungen an die Zukunft (1968; trans Michael Heron as Chariots of the Gods? 1969), which, based on a mass of often suspect and internally inconsistent data, argues that the Earth was visited by at least one Alien spacefaring race before and at the dawn of historical time; thus, for example, the Great Pyramid (a ...
Barth, John
(1930- ) US author, one of the central fabulists (see Fabulation) of his generation of writers, noted for a sometimes relentless experimentalism; he is probably best known for his epic mock-picaresque The Sot-Weed Factor (1960; rev 1967) which, though not literally fantastic, hovers at the edge of the impossible whenever its protagonist's "tutor" Henry Burlingame – a secretive, sometimes invisible, ...
Dakron, Ron
Pseudonym of US poet and author Ronald J Christoffel (1953- ). His novel Hammers (1997) describes in a somewhat gonzo literary style the transformation of five characters into hammerhead sharks (see Biology). The novella Mantids (2008) is a darkly humorous updating of Petronius's Satyricon. [JC/SH]
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 ...