SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 15 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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Attack of the Giant Leeches
Film (1959; vt Attack of the Blood Leeches; vt Demons of the Swamp UK; vt The Giant Leeches). American International Pictures (US), Anglo-Amalgamated Film Distributors (UK). Executive producer: Roger Corman. Produced by Gene Corman. Directed by Bernard L Kowalski. Written by Leo Gordon from his original story. Cast includes Guy Buccola (uncredited), George Cisar, Ken Clark, Michael ...
Large, E C
(1902-1976) UK botanist and author who began to publish poetry and fiction in the late 1920s. Sugar in the Air: A Romance (1937), first of the two connected Charles Pry tales, is a notable and original Scientific Romance bitterly but wryly describing the conflicts which arise between scientific and commercial interests during experiments with artificial photosynthesis; eventually, Charles Pry develops a process to manufacture sugar ...
Hargreaves, Gerald
(1881-1972) UK politician, judge, composer, playwright and author, in active service during World War One. He is of some sf interest for his only published play, Atalanta: A Story of Atlantis: A Fantasy with Music (1948) as by His Honour Judge Sir Gerald Hargreaves (see Atlantis), a musical drama based, according to his introduction, on Plato's Critias (circa 350 BCE) ...
Blake, Tim
(1952- ) UK composer and musician. In addition to playing keyboards with Hawkwind, Blake released a number of solo works, with one, Blake's New Jerusalem (1978), of particular genre interest. Blake's generally slow, throbbing synthesizer playing and reedily plangent voice imagines a future Utopia that includes his titular City as well as the deep space beacon of "Lighthouse" ...
DeMille, Nelson
(1943-2024) US author of several Technothrillers in collaboration – originally anonymously – with Thomas H Block. The collaboration is made explicit only in the revised version of Block's first book, Mayday (1979; rev 1997 as by Thomas Block and Nelson DeMille). These tales all hover at the edge of genuine sf; of these, two are of particular interest: the ...
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 ...