SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 4 October 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 3 October 2023
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Close Encounters of the Third Kind – The Special Edition
Film (1980). Credits as for Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). 132 minutes. Colour. / This slightly shorter, re-edited version of Spielberg's huge 1977 success, which contains some new footage, represents a curious piece of cinematic history. Many critics saw it as inferior to the original, though the idea was that Spielberg now had so much commercial clout that he could, at ...
Future Boy Conan
Japanese animated tv series (1978; vt Conan, The Boy in Future). Original title Mirai Shōnen Konan. Based on the novel The Incredible Tide (1970) by Alexander Key. Nippon Animation. Directed by Hayao Miyazaki. Written by Satoshi Kurumi, Akira Nakano and Sōji Yoshikawa. Voice cast includes Iemasa Kayumi, Ichirô Nagai, Mieko Nobusawa, Noriko Ohara, ...
Jackson, Charles Loring
(1847-1935) US chemist, influential academic and author, whose The Gold Point and Other Strange Stories (coll 1926) contains several sf tales, including "The Cube", about an amoeba-like Monster capable of imitating human form and Identity Transfer, and "An Undiscovered Island in the Far Sea", in which two strange interrelated intelligent species are discovered on a Pacific Island. ...
Bacon, Paul
(1923-2015) US graphic artist active from the 1940s until about a year before his death, and responsible for an estimated 6500 book-cover designs (plus some 200 for jazz LPs). Inevitably, with such a huge total of covers, quite a number were for sf authors, well over seventy of them, some of whom published several books with his covers; his first in the genre is probably that for Gunner Cade (1952) by Cyril Judd. He became known for the "Big Book ...
Siegel, Richard
(1955-2018) US illustrator, Comics artist, filmmaker and author whose one sf novel is Alien Plague (1979) as by Stephard Noir, in which a medical Disaster is sourced to the Outer Planets. Under his own name, he is best known for an sf Satire framed as a photo-documentary, ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its listing of Pseudonyms. ...