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Wednesday 18 September 2024
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 17 September 2024
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Day the Earth Caught Fire, The
Film (1961). British Lion/Pax/Universal. Produced and directed by Val Guest. Cast includes Arthur Christiansen, Edward Judd, Leo McKern and Janet Munro. Written by Wolf Mankowitz, Guest. 99 minutes, cut to 90 minutes (US). Black and white. / Val Guest, who had made The Quatermass Xperiment (1956) and other sf/horror films for Hammer in the 1950s, excelled himself with this intelligent Disaster ...
Amazing Stories
"The magazine of scientifiction", with whose founding Hugo Gernsback announced the existence of sf as a distinct literary species. It was initially a letter-sized SF Magazine issued monthly by Gernsback's Experimenter Publishing Company as a companion to Science and Invention and Radio News, first issue dated April 1926, and was the first magazine to publish science fiction ...
Gems, Jonathan
(1952- ) US screenwriter and author of Mars Attacks! (1996), a Tie to the Tim Burton film Mars Attacks! (1996), which it novelizes. This film's screenplay was also by Gems, based on the "Mars Attacks" series of Topps trading cards (1962); he had earlier co-scripted Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), based on ...
Conapt
In sf Terminology, an apartment in a high-rise building. Conapts often feature what is effectively a complete life-support system, so that even when they are in a densely populated city their inhabitants are often seen to be isolated from other people. A conapt is often assumed to be in a city consisting of high-rise buildings, each one highly populated, but with the buildings themselves not necessarily crowded together, and sometimes separated by parkland. ...
Groundstar Conspiracy, The
Film (1972; vt The Alien). Hal Roach Studios/Universal Pictures. Produced by Hal Roach Jr and Trevor Wallace. Directed by Lamont Johnson. Screenplay by Douglas Heyes (credited as Michael Howard), loosely based on The Alien (1968; vt The Groundstar Conspiracy 1972) by L P Davies (credited as Leslie P Davies). Cast includes Christine Belford, George Peppard and Michael Sarrazin. 103 minutes. Colour. / John David Welles ...
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 ...