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Sunday 14 June 2026
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for what we mean by Science Fiction; here for the masthead; here for some Statistics; here for the 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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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Quality Comics
The name most often used by US Comics publisher Comic Magazines Inc, founded in 1937 and active for some years. The logo Quality Comics appeared on all its titles from 1940 to the end of its existence. Established by Everett "Busy" Arnold (1899-1974), Quality published in various genres; Superheroes made up the bulk of its titles in the early to late 1940s, with such characters as Plastic Man (which ...
Wharton, Thomas
(1963- ) Canadian teacher, poet and author, active from before 1980, his first novel Icefields (1995) being an intensely aetherealized paean to the Canadian Wilderness that edges at points into the water margins of Fantastika. His second novel, Salamander (2001), which is fantasy, initiates a career-long interrogation and absorption into the story-engendering ontological fecundity of ...
Two People Exchanging Saliva
French film (2024; original title Deux personnes échangeant de la salive). Misia Films, Preromanbritain, Galeries Lafeyette. Written and directed by Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh. Cast includes Zar Amir Ebrahimi, Luàna Bajrami and Aurélie Boquien. 36 minutes. Black and white. / In an unspecified Dystopia which looks like contemporary Paris, kissing is a crime punishable by death, ...
St George, David
Joint pseudonym of UK author David Phillips (? - ) and Bulgarian engineer and author Georgi Markov, the latter in the UK from about 1971; his assassination in London at the hands of Bulgarian agents was admitted only in 1990 after the old government fell. In their spoofish Near Future Satire, The Right Honourable Chimpanzee (1978), a crisis-ridden UK ...
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 ...