SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 13 August 2022
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 8 August 2022
Sponsor of the day: Handheld Press
Deadly Harvest
Film (1977). Burg-Ambassador, Joebeck Production. Directed by Timothy Bond. Written by Martin Lager. Cast includes David Brown, Kim Cattrall, Gary Davies, Nehemiah Persoff and Clint Walker. 87 minutes. Colour. / Deadly Harvest is set in an over-industrialized Near Future America where Climate Change in the form of global cooling has shrunk available farmland. Predictably this leads to chaos, with roving bands out to steal whatever food supplies they can; several such raids are led by Mort ...
Car Wars
Board and counter Wargame (1981). Steve Jackson Games (SJG). Designed by Steve Jackson, Chad Irby. / Car Wars is a game of "autoduelling" – combat between armed and armoured cars, motorcycles and trucks. It is set in a fragmented future America, in which oil and food crises have caused the near collapse of civilization. The game's Future History exemplifies many of the social and ecological fears of the 1970s; in this world casual violence is common, and autoduelling is both a ...
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Film (2008). Lucasfilm Ltd/Paramount Pictures. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Written by David Koepp, based on a story by George Lucas and Jeff Nathanson. Cast includes Karen Allen, Harrison Ford and Shia LeBoef. 122 minutes. Colour. / The first three instalments of this much-loved modern Pulp series – Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) – are Fantasy films that hinge on the acquisition of ...
Battlefield Earth
Film (2000). Warner Bros presents a Franchise Pictures and Morgan Creek Productions film in association with Battlefield Productions, JTP Films and Mel's Cite du Cinema. Directed by Roger Christian. Written by Corey Mandell and J D Shapiro, based on the first half of the novel Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000 (1982) by L Ron Hubbard. Cast includes Kim Coates, Sabine Karsenti, Michael MacRae, Barry Pepper, Kelly Preston, John Travolta and Forest Whitaker. Colour. 111 minutes. / ...
Last Dinosaur, The
Made-for-tv film (1977). Rankin/Bass Productions-Tsuburaya Productions for ABC-TV. Produced by Jules Bass. Directed by Alexander Grasshoff, Tsugunobu Kotani (credited as Tom Kotani). Written by William Overgard. Cast includes Richard Boone, Steven Keats (Chuck Wade), Tetsu Nakamura, Luther Rackley (Bunta) and Joan Van Ark. 106 minutes, cut to 95 minutes. Colour. / Masten Thrust Jr (Boone) is a billionaire oil company owner and big-game hunter whose company has discovered an Underground Lost ...
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 ...