SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 29 September 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 25 September 2023
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Archer, William
(1856-1924) Scottish critic, translator and playwright, an important reformer of the near-moribund English theatre through his translations of Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), through his critical essays assembled in Masks or Faces? (coll 1888) and elsewhere, and through his alliance with George Bernard Shaw. He is of minor sf interest for a late play, The Green Goddess: A Play in Four Acts (performed Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 1920; ...
Clones, The
Film (1973; vt Dead Man Running). Filmmakers International/New World Pictures. Produced by Paul Hunt. Directed by Lamar Card and Hunt. Written by Steve Fisher from an original story by Card and Hunt. Cast includes Stanley Adams, Michael Greene, Susan Hunt and Gregory Sierra. 95 minutes. Colour. / Nuclear physicist Dr Gerald Appleby (Greene) discovers to his horror that an exact duplicate of himself has been attending his workplace and seeing his girlfriend Penny (Hunt). He has ...
Michel, Lincoln
(1982- ) US author, active initially from around 2005 as a writer of short stories, several of which have been assembled as Urgent Beasts (coll 2015), some of them evoking Horror in SF worlds. He is of specific sf interest for his first novel, The Body Scout (2021), set in a corporatized Near Future Cyberpunk-inflected America; the protagonist, a ...
Wilson, Chris
(1949- ) UK psychologist and author most of whose novels work as a series of attempts to address issues of Identity through narratives featuring solitary Candide-like eccentrics exposed to – but not necessarily trapped by – the world at large. In Gallimauf's Gospel (1986), which is set on a remote Island in the nineteenth century, a monkey is washed ashore and mistaken for a Frenchman, even ...
Heath, Peter
Working name of US author Peter Heath Fine (1938-1995), whose novels Assassins from Tomorrow (1967) – which suggests that John F Kennedy (see Icons) was assassinated by killers from the future – The Mind Brothers (1967) and Men Who Die Twice (1968) comprise the thriller-like Mind Brothers sf series, which combines a great deal of fairly convoluted action with Time Travel. The ...
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 ...