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Monday 23 May 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.
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Robot Carnival
Japanese animated film (1987). Original title Robotto Kānibaru. A.P.P.P. Directors and writers are named below. Voice cast includes James R Bowers, Junko Machida and Kohji Moritsugu. 90 minutes. Colour. / An anthology of sf shorts featuring Robots, eight in all (nine if the linked opening and closing segments are counted separately). Only two stories have dialogue. / Opening directed by Katsuhiro Ōtomo: a monolithic, decrepit structure on caterpillar tracks runs over a desert ...
Thomas, Chauncey
(1822-1898) US author of a technocratic Utopia, The Crystal Button; Or Adventures of Paul Prognosis in the Forty-Ninth Century (1891); the text was apparently drafted in the 1870s, and only submitted for publication after the success of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), when it was edited by George Houghton (of Houghton, Mifflin and Company). The protagonist, seemingly brain-damaged in 1872, travels in a dream-state to the year 4872, where he learns of the benign turn the world has ...
Kelton, Aryan
Working name of US author Aryon Lewis Kelton (1892-1957), who also wrote as A Lewis Kelton; his sf novel, The Great Haddon (1933), features a psychoanalyst who uses his powers of Telepathy in an attempt to dominate Wall Street and to obtain Sex from unwitting female victims. An earlier book by Kelton, the nonfiction Power of the Universe (1929), argues that the human subconscious is more powerful than we ken. [JC]
Wells, David A
(1828-1898) US engineer, economist, editor, inventor and author, mostly of nonfiction like The Science of Common Things (1857) and a very popular textbook, Wells's Natural Philosophy (1863); he was a free-trade advocate, holding influential positions during the presidencies of Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson. He is of sf interest for Robinson Crusoe's Money; Or, the Remarkable Financial Fortunes and Misfortunes of a Remote Island Community (1876), set on an Island Utopia which boast a ...
Cantril, Hadley
(1906-1969) US psychologist and sociologist whose The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic: With the Complete Script of the Famous Orson Welles Broadcast (1940), "with the assistance of" Hazel Gaudet and Herta Herzog, prints for the first time the script by Howard Koch for Orson Welles's 30 October 1938 Radio broadcast of H G Wells's The War of the Worlds (April-December 1897 Pearson's; 1898) as preface to an extensive quantitative analysis and evaluation of the reasons that ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its listing of Pseudonyms. Criticized at first for its failure to annotate its findings – so that, for instance, pseudonyms used for sf could not be ...