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Thursday 19 May 2022
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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Mask of Fu Manchu, The
Film (1932). Cosmopolitan/MGM. Directed by Charles Brabin, Charles Vidor. Written by Irene Kuhn, Edgar Allen Woolf, John Willard, based on The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) by Sax Rohmer. Cast includes Jean Hersholt, Boris Karloff, Myrna Loy, Karen Morley and Lewis Stone. 72 minutes, cut to 67 minutes. Black and white. / Rohmer's Oriental supervillain has since been brought to the screen many times (see Fu Manchu) but this first, visually lavish version, produced by Irving Thalberg, is the most ...
Clock, Herbert
(1890-1979) US author, apparently the senior collaborator with Eric Boetzel on The Light in the Sky (1929), an sf tale set in an Underground Lost World extending from Mexico into the Gulf of Mexico, where Aztecs retreated after the genocidal onslaught of the Spanish and have constructed, over the centuries, a culture dominated by the possession of Immortality, high science, Telepathy, and – apparently – human sacrifice. The protagonist, lured from combat in World War One by a ...
Pellerin, Georges
Pseudonym of unidentified French author (? -? ); in his introduction to that author's only known work of sf interest – Le Monde dans 2000 Ans (1878; trans Brian Stableford as The World in 2000 Years 2011) – Stableford plausibly argues that he may have been a political economist named Gustave Dupuynode (1817-1898), who held similar opinions to those expressed in "Pellerin"'s Utopia. But Stableford does not claim to have found hard evidence of this ...
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 last, release the film exactly as he had always wanted it. New material includes a scene where Neary, the ...
Hall, Louisa
(1982- ) US academic, poet and author who is of sf interest for her second novel, Speak (2015), a multi-voiced tale moderated and in part iterated by AIs, who have come to something like self-consciousness through a radical concept underlying their development: that consciousness is not generated by number-crunching but through the centripetal magnetism through time of storytelling. The figures depicted range from a young seventeenth century emigrant to America through a ...
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 ...