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Friday 7 February 2025
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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Sarrantonio, Al
(1952-2025) US editor and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Ahead of the Joneses" in Asimov's for March 1979. Much of his work was horror, sometimes tinged with sf (see Horror in SF), including his first novel, The Worms (1985), a Gothic tale set in Massachusetts with hints of H P Lovecraft; and the Equipoisal Moonbane ...
City Limits
Film (1984). Sho Films/Videoform/Island Alive. Directed by Aaron Lipstadt. Written by Don Opper, from a story by Lipstadt and James Reigle. Cast includes Kim Cattrall, Rae Dawn Chong, Darrell Larson and John Stockwell. 85 minutes. Colour. / Disappointing exploitation movie from the writer and director of the first-rate Android (1982). Fifteen years after the USA has been almost wiped out by a Pandemic, two biker ...
Imaginary Science
Imaginary science is extremely common in sf; it is not at all the same thing as Pseudoscience. The difference is that the adherents of the pseudosciences believe them to be true, whereas the sf writer who uses imaginary science knows perfectly well that it is untrue. / Sf has often been criticized for scientific illiteracy, sometimes unfairly, for, while it does produce many simple Scientific Errors, it commonly uses ...
Cowboys & Aliens
Film (2011). Dreamworks Pictures, Universal Pictures, and Reliance Entertainment in association with Relativity Media present an Imagine Entertainment/KO Paper Products/Fairview Entertainment/Platinum Studios production. Directed by Jon Favreau. Written by Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman & Damon Lindelof and Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby; story by Fergus & Ostby and Steve Oedekerk, based on Cowboys and Aliens (graph 2006) by Scott ...
Singh, Nikhil
(? - ) South African artist, musician and author whose first novel, Taty Went West (2015), follows with considerable verve the adventures of a teenaged runaway into the Outzone of an Equipoisally-complex Near Future world, at some Post-Holocaust point where the leashes of consensual reality have been loosened;a Drug ...
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 ...