SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 4 October 2023
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 3 October 2023
Sponsor of the day: Terrence Somerville
Operation Ganymed
Film (1977). Pentagrama/Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen. Written and directed by Rainer Erler. Cast includes Horst Frank, Uwe Friedrichsen, Claud Theo Gaestner, Dieter Laser, Jurgen Prochnow and Vicky Roskilly. 126 minutes, cut to 120 minutes. Colour. / This grim German film emerges as a realist response to fantasies like Planet of the Apes (1968). On their return to Earth, five survivors of a three-ship, 21-man mission to Ganymede crashland ...
Roborally
Board Game (1994). Wizards of the Coast (WotC). Designed by Richard Garfield. / RoboRally is a light hearted game of Robot carnage, reminiscent of the UK television series Robot Wars (1997-2003) or the US BattleBots (2000-2002). The players are bored supercomputers who decide to relieve their ennui by staging a race around a series of checkpoints with ...
Last Night
Film (1998). Rhombus Media presents in association with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Haut et Court and La Sept-Arte a film produced with the participation of Téléfilm Canada. Written and directed by Don McKellar. Cast includes Michael Barry, Geneviève Bujold, Jackie Burroughs, David Cronenberg, Robin Gammell, Arsinée Khanjian, Roberta Maxwell, Don McKellar, Sandra Oh, Sarah Polley, Callum Keith Rennie and Tracy ...
LC-39
US Semiprozine published by Launch Publications, Baltimore, Maryland and edited by Matthew Walls. It saw just three issues, undated, but from Spring 1999 to Spring 2000. The title was derived from the old NASA term for Launch Complex 39, from where all the Apollo lunar missions had been launched. Walls wanted the magazine to serve as a launch pad for new writers and at the same time represent much that was central to science fiction, the desire to explore and ...
Kanar, Stephen
(1944- ) US author in whose Near Future medical thriller, The J Factor (1983), a further Dystopian element is added to American healthcare: big pharma and big business now jointly control who will be offered medical treatment, at any price. [JC]
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 ...