SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 15 January 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.
Site updated on 13 January 2025
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Seconds
Film (1966). Paramount/Joel/Gibraltar. Directed by John Frankenheimer. Written by Lewis John Carlino, from Seconds (1963) by David Ely. Cast includes Will Geer, Rock Hudson, Salome Jens and John Randolph. 106 minutes. Black and white. / A middle-aged businessman (Randolph) pays a large sum to have his death faked and his youth restored by futuristic surgery (see ...
Mr Hublot
Luxembourg/French short animated film (2013). ZEILT productions, WATT frame. Directed by Alexandre Espigares and Laurent Witz. Written by Laurent Witz. No dialogue. 11 minutes. Colour. / Mr Hublot takes in a stray Dog, but it grows far too large for his apartment, so the pair move into a nearby derelict warehouse where they live happily. Mr Hublot has OCD and works alone at home; so the dog is both a trial and a comfort, but chiefly the latter. / Mr ...
Golden, Christopher
(1967- ) US author, prolific and successful for his many fantasy and horror novels, who is given an entry here mainly for some sf Ties published early in his career. Some of his horror evokes Horror in SF tonalities, like Snowblind (2014), in which a "Great Storm" feels almost planetary in its violence and implications, though the story itself is a classic Answered Prayer tale [see The ...
British Science Fiction Award
A alternative name sometimes used in the past for the British Science Fiction Association Award (BSFA Award), particularly in publishers' jacket copy. A seemingly national award was presumably thought to carry more prestige than one chosen by members of a society. [DRL]
Oliver, Chad
Working name for his sf of US anthropologist and author Symmes Chadwick Oliver (1928-1993). Oliver was born in Ohio but spent most of his life in Texas, where he took his MA at the University of Texas (his 1952 thesis, "They Builded a Tower", being an early academic study of sf); he then took a PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles, and became professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin, where he remained in some ...
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 ...