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Monday 17 January 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.
Site updated on 17 January 2022
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Rubens, Michael
(? - ) US author of The Sheriff of Yrnameer (2009), a spoofish Satire of late modern capitalism in a Planetary Romance venue, the eponymous planet, pronounced Your Name Here, being the only unbranded world in human space: for the self-commodification of Homo sapiens has reached something like saturation point. Yrnameer is a pastoral Utopia, and is under threat. The humour is barbed. [JC]
Moonraker
Film (1979). Eon/Les Productions Artistes Associés. Directed by Lewis Gilbert. Written by Christopher Wood, very loosely based on Moonraker (1955) by Ian Fleming. Cast includes Lois Chiles, Richard Kiel, Michael Lonsdale and Roger Moore. 126 minutes. Colour. / British agent James Bond (Moore) uncovers a plot by megalomaniac Hugo Drax (Lonsdale) to destroy the present human race using space-launched nerve-gas capsules and replace it by a master race, to be specially bred in a large, ...
Stout, Rex
(1886-1975) US author who began publishing poems and stories in magazines as early as 1910, and became best known for his Nero Wolfe detective stories, beginning with Fer-de-Lance (1934) and continuing to the end of his life, the last being A Family Affair (1975); none of the Wolfe novels and novellas have any fantastic content. Some of his early work does, however, contain fantastic elements: the book-length "A Prize for Princes" (2 May 1914 Cavalier/30 May 1914 All-Story Cavalier Weekly [see ...
Velikovsky, Immanuel
(1895-1979) Russian-born psychiatrist and author, in Germany from 1921, in Palestine 1924-1939, and then in US until his death; primarily known for a series of books putting forward, with a vast amount of documentation and argument, a theory of Earth's history which proposes that comparatively recent large-scale changes in the solar system had catastrophic effects on the Earth, and that historical evidence for this Cosmology (in the form of legends, Mythology, the Bible and other accounts) ...
Battlezone
Videogame (1998). Activision. Platforms: Win; rev vt Battlezone: Rise of the Black Dogs, N64 (2000); Amiga (2001). / Battlezone is an innovative Real Time Strategy game, inspired by the largely unrelated arcade tank combat game Battlezone (1980 Atari, Arcade, Others) designed by Ed Rotberg. Its gameplay uses a three-dimensional first person view to combine the physical urgency of an action game with the flexible thinking required in an RTS. Players pilot "hovertanks" in real time while ...
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 ...