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Thursday 19 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.
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Frith, Henry
(1840-1917) Irish-born civil engineer, translator and author, in England from early adulthood; mostly known for his translations from the French, at least six being of novels by Jules Verne, beginning with Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (trans 1876). He is credited with a short story of sf interest, "The Balloon of the Future" (May 1885 Cassell's Family Magazine) (see Balloons), and an adaptation, which may ...
Gillette, King Camp
(1855-1932) US salesman and industrialist who partially invented and wholly made practicable the disposal safety razor, founding the company that now bears his name in 1901; his works as an author, sometimes as by King C Gillette, were universally focused on Utopian solutions to the dilemmas he saw infecting the rapidly expanding capitalist world, beginning with The Human Drift (1894), which advocates a socialist, pollution-free, non-competition-based ...
Mason, F Van Wyck
(1901-1978) US author, who sometimes gave his name variously as F V W Mason, Van Wyck Mason, Frank Van Wyck Mason and Frank W Mason, and who published as well under at least two pseudonyms, Geoffrey Coffin and Ward Weaver; in active service during World War One and World War Two. Though now best known as a writer of historical novels with an emphasis on romantic adventure plots, he was initially prolific in shorter forms, ...
Long, Amelia Reynolds
(1903-1978) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Twin Soul" for Weird Tales in March 1928, and who contributed "The Mechanical Man" to the two-story Science Fiction Series anthology, Mechanical Man/Thought Stealer (anth 1930 chap), the second story being by Frank Bourne. Her story "The Thought-Monster" (March 1930 Weird Tales) was much later filmed ...
Melancholia
Film (2011). Zentropa Entertainments. Written and directed by Lars von Trier. Cast includes Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, John Hurt, Charlotte Rampling, Alexander Skarsgård, Stellan Skarsgård and Kiefer Sutherland. 136 minutes. Colour. / On a Swedish island estate, a depressive bride (Dunst) blows off her lavish wedding and awaits the End of the World with her sister (Gainsbourg) as the newly-discovered giant planet Melancholia ...
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 ...