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Monday 16 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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Perry, Roger

Pseudonym of UK author Roger William Cowern (1928- ), author of three undemanding Space Operas for Robert Hale Limited: Senior Citizen (1979), The Making of Jason (1980) and Esper's War (1981). [JC]

Letter-size Cinema-focused Media Magazine printed on newsprint-quality paper with some glossy pages included. One issue only, August 1978. Tandem Publications. Editor: Irv Karchmer. / Intended as a companion to Science Fantasy Film Classics, this handsomely-produced title never made it past the debut issue. Much of this issue was devoted to The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), including a fold-out poster of the famous "gill-man" Monster. Among the other films covered were Five Million ...

Planetary

US Comic-book series by writer Warren Ellis and artist John Cassaday, published by Wildstorm Comics (which later became an imprint of DC Comics). The series ran for 27 issues and was published sporadically from April 1999 to October 2009. Three additional issues outside the main series, one of which crossed over with Batman, were also published in 2000, 2002 and 2003; two of these were drawn by other artists. / The series revolves around Planetary, a team of "Archaeologists of the ...

Time Paradoxes

The fact that Time Travel into the past disrupts the pattern of causality, changing or cancelling matters of known fact, has not caused stories of this kind to be banished from the sf field; instead it has led to the growth of a subgenre of stories celebrating the peculiar aesthetics of such Paradoxes. The essential paradoxicality of time travel is often dramatized by asking: "What would happen if I went back in time and killed my own grandfather?" – a question to which sf writers have ...

Moffett, Cleveland

(1863-1926) US playwright and popular author, usually of detective stories but also of one of the most explicit Edisonades to appear in early-twentieth-century US sf. In The Conquest of America: A Romance of Disaster and Victory: USA, 1921 AD [for full title see Checklist] (1916), it is Thomas Alva Edison himself who saves the USA from decadent socialists, while fending off a threat of Future War from Germany. The Mysterious Card (coll of linked stories 1912) is of interest for the title story, ...

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 ...