SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 13 January 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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McComas, J Francis
(1911-1978) US editor and author who published a number of sf stories under his own name – including "Shock Treatment" (in 9 Tales of Space and Time, anth 1954, ed Raymond J Healy) and "Parallel" (April 1955 F&SF) – and as Webb Marlowe. He was co-editor with Raymond J Healy of the thirty-five-story Anthology ...
'Way Out
US tv series (1961). Talent Associates for CBS-TV. Produced by Jacqueline Babbin, Mike Donn. Created by David Susskind. Directors include Marc Daniels, Daniel Petrie, Seymour Robbie, Boris Sagal, Ron Winston. Writers include Irving Gaynor Neiman Jr, Sumner Locke Elliott and Philip H Reisman Jr. Makeup artist: Dick Smith. Host: Roald Dahl. 14 25-minute episodes. Black and white. / A ...
Logan, Charles
(1930- ) UK author, and nurse for the mentally handicapped. Shipwreck (1975) won the 1975 Gollancz/Sunday Times sf contest jointly with Chris Boyce's Catchworld (1975). Calmly and inexorably, it tells the story of the inevitable death of a man whose Spaceship lands disabled on a planet orbiting Capella; the Ecology he is faced with is inimical to ...
Doré, Gustave
(1832-1883) French painter and illustrator, far more successful in the latter capacity, as he was clearly inspired to do his best work by pre-existing texts, many of them fantastic; as a satirist he was also highly successful, though his targets were local (ie mid-nineteenth century France) and are relatively difficult to appreciate by a contemporary audience. At the same time, the constantly fantasticated exorbitance of his caricatures and other popular drawings underpins his more sustained ...
Holmes, Bruce T
(1946- ) US singer/songwriter and author whose sf novel, Anvil of the Heart (1983), presents with some poignance one of the potential nightmares attendant upon the successful Genetic Engineering of the human species: the slow death of the last pre-altered humans as their children confront (and incomprehensibly transform) a new world. [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 ...