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Saturday 4 February 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.
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Miller, Ian
(1946- ) UK illustrator. After graduating from St Martin's College of Art, Miller became a commercial illustrator in 1970, with both book-cover work and interior Illustrations, some of the latter in David Day's The Tolkien Bestiary (1979). He did highly characteristic work on the backgrounds for Wizards (1977), an animated film with a Far Future setting directed by Ralph Bakshi ...
Stanford, J K
(1892-1971) UK civil servant, solider and author, mostly of humorous material, whose first book, The Twelfth (1944 chap; vt The Twelfth and After: Being the Life and Death of George Hysteron-Proteron 1964), is a spoofish fantasy whose hunter protagonist is turned into a bird, and organizes his new kin to avoid being shot. His sf Satire, Full Moon at Sweatenham: A Nightmare (1953), takes rather clumsy potshots at a decadent, ...
Méliès, Georges
(1861-1938) French theatre and film director and entrepreneur. A natural showman, Méliès began his theatrical career as a conjurer, designing his own trick gadgets, against the wishes of his family, whose wealth came from manufacturing shoes. In 1888, his father's death allowed him to sell his interest in the firm, helping to provide him with the finances to buy the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, and his magic shows there became famous. In 1896, ...
Hoche, Jules
(1859-1926) French author whose works seem to divide fairly equally between fiction and nonfiction. Several of his novels are sf, including Le Faiseur d'Hommes et sa Formule (1906; trans Brian Stableford as The Maker of Men and His Formula 2015), a tale clearly influence by H G Wells's The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), though the eponymous Mad Scientist ...
Metroid
Videogame (1986). Nintendo. Designed by Gunpei Yokoi, Yoshio Sakamoto. Platforms: NES (1986); GBA (2005); Wii (2007). / Similarly to its contemporary Exile (1988), Metroid is a combination of platform and puzzle game (see Videogames), displayed from the side in two dimensions. As with many examples of the more recent action Adventure ...
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. His first professional publication was the long sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" (Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959] Triquarterly), though he only began publishing sf reviews in 1964 and sf proper with "A Man Must Die" in New Worlds for ...