SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 29 September 2023
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 25 September 2023
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Fail Safe
Film (1964). Max E Youngstein-Sidney Lumet. Directed by Sidney Lumet. Written by Walter Bernstein, based on Fail-Safe (13-27 October 1962 Saturday Evening Post; 1962) by Eugene L Burdick and Harvey Wheeler. Cast includes Henry Fonda, Walter Matthau, Dan O'Herlihy, Frank Overton and Fritz Weaver. 111 minutes. Colour. / A mistaken US nuclear attack on Moscow ...
Unknown Terror, The
Film (1957; vt Beyond Terror). Emirau Productions/Regal Films/20th Century Fox Film Corporation. Produced by Robert Stabler. Directed by Charles Marquis Warren. Written by Kenneth Higgins. Cast includes Charles Gray, John Howard, Sir Lancelot, Gerald Milton, Mala Powers, Paul Richards and May Wynn. 76 minutes. Black and white. / Explorer Jim Wheatley (Gray) disappeared six months before the film begins, while exploring a mysterious cave in southern Mexico. His sister Gina ...
Gadallah, Leslie
(1939- ) Canadian author best known for her Empire of Kaz sequence – starting with Cat's Pawn (1987) – in which a human protagonist becomes involved with the eponymous Cat-like Alien Orioni, themselves involved in a desperate war against the invading Kazi, who dominate much of the Galaxy by the end of the second volume, which ends on an unusual downbeat, suggesting that further volumes ...
Salisbury, William
(1875-? ) US author of two novels of sf interest. The American Emperor (1913) is a Dystopia in which an American speculator destroys all opposition to his ambitions, and becomes Emperor of America. In his Satire, The Squareheads: The Story of a Socialized State: A Futuristic Novel (1929), a pilot, losing conscious during a stunt, enters ...
Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space
Japanese animated film (2007). Kinétique. Directed and written by t.o.L. Voice cast includes Béatrice Dalle, Takeshi Kato, Hisayo Mochizuki and Shinji Takeda. 92 minutes, plus three OVAs. Mainly black and white. / In 2010 Tokyo, on Cat Earth in the Feline Galaxy, lives cute catgirl Tamala (Mochizuki). This Earth is culturally similar to our own, but is populated by Cat people with advanced ...
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 ...