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Monday 13 January 2025
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Alternative 3
UK tv pseudo-documentary (1977). Anglia TV. Directed by Christopher Miles; devised and written by David Ambrose. Cast includes Tim Brinton, Carol Hazell, Gregory Munroe. 56 minutes. Colour. / Presented as an ITV "Science Report" on 22 June 1977, this exercise in sf Paranoia fronted by UK news anchor Brinton was meant as an April Fool's Day hoax but was delayed by industrial action. The premise of the "exposé" is ...
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 ...
Tachyons
There is an only half-facetious precept in Physics stating that "anything which is not prohibited is compulsory". Olexa-Myron Bilaniuk and E C George Sudarshan suggested in 1962, and Gerald Feinberg in 1967, that the idea of a particle that can only travel Faster Than Light does not violate any of the basic maxims of Relativistic physics. Such a hypothetical particle (a tachyon, as opposed to ...
Updike, John
(1932-2009) US author whose carefully polished and opulent style led him more than once beyond the constraints of the mimetic, though he never abandoned his conviction that the narrative conventions of realism necessitously sufficed to describe the world, and he was in this sense a paradigmatic Mainstream Writer of SF; his aversion to genres in literature was conspicuous, as shown in a remarkably obtuse review (20 March 1995 The New Yorker) of ...
Maturin, Charles R
(1782-1824) Irish author, playwright and clergyman, the son of French Protestants in exile, who wrote several Gothic romances and sensational plays with intermittent success – most notably The Fatal Revenge, or The Family of Montorio (1807 3vols) as by Dennis Jasper Murphy – before the publication of his definitive terror-romance, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820 4vols) anonymous. The eponymous hero, who is reminiscent of figures ...
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 ...