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Friday 14 February 2025
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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Moore, Chris
(1947-2025) Prolific UK artist, known to the public primarily for his hard-edged treatment of Hard SF subjects, although in fact he produced covers in different styles for all sorts of other genres as well, including illustrations of record sleeves for artists as diverse as Rod Stewart, Fleetwood Mac, Status Quo and Pentangle. What impressed most about Moore's sf art was not just the photographic realism but the sense of scale, achieved largely through a ...
Night of the Big Heat
Film (1967; vt Island of the Burning Damned). Planet. Directed by Terence Fisher. Written by Ronald Liles, Pip Baker, Jane Baker, based on The Night of the Big Heat (1959) by John Lymington. Cast includes Patrick Allen, Peter Cushing, Sarah Lawson, Christopher Lee and Jane Merrow. 97 minutes, cut to 94 minutes. Colour. / An island off the UK coast experiences a freak heatwave, during which there are a number of mysterious ...
Burgess, Anthony
Working name of UK composer and author John Anthony Burgess Wilson (1917-1993), known primarily for his work outside the sf field; as a composer he worked under his full name. Trained in English literature and phonetics, Burgess taught at home and in Malaysia 1946-1960, then returned to the UK (though later moved to Monaco) and became a full-time Protean man of letters, novelist, musician, composer and specialist in Shakespeare and James Joyce. ...
Courtier, S H
Working name of Sidney Hobson Courtier (1904-1974), Australian school-teacher and author who principally wrote crime fiction, often with Australian bush settings and Aboriginal characters. His two sf thrillers for Robert Hale Limited are Into the Silence (1973), in which silence engulfs the Earth and the loss of spoken-word Communication brings chaos; and The Smiling Trip (1975), where a ...
Goodman, Dickie
(1934-1989) US record producer who with his aspiring songwriter friend Bill Buchanan (1930-1996) launched both their careers with the comic novelty record "The Flying Saucer Parts 1 and 2" (1956). Inspired by Orson Welles's radio broadcast War of the Worlds (1938), it is credited with being the first record to use the "break-in" technique, which evolved into modern-day sampling. Buchanan and Goodman ...
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. He began to publish work of genre interest with an sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" in Triquarterly for Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959]; he began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and later in ...