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Monday 29 May 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 29 May 2023
Sponsor of the day: Joe Haldeman
Smith, Mary C
(? - ) US-born author, resident in Nigeria, whose sf novel, The Undesirables (1998), is set in an ostensible distant Near Future plebiscitary democracy which – along lines soon to become almost mandatory in the sf literature – turns out to be a Dystopia whose undesirables, defined on Eugenic lines, live in ...
Ville d'Avray, Arthur Armand
(1844-1907) French soldier, naturalist and author whose Voyage dans la Lune avant 1900 ["Voyage to the Moon around 1900"] (graph 1892) is a visual narrative, illustrated and captioned by Ville d'Avary, and apparently intended for children. Its protagonists fly to the Moon in a Balloon, where they confront Monsters; they are then transported to Saturn (see ...
Command & Conquer
Videogame series (from 1995). Westwood Studios (WS). / Command & Conquer is a series of Real Time Strategy games, played from an overhead view of the battlefield. As in Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty (1992), to which the first Command & Conquer game was an unofficial sequel, the player must gather resources which they can use to build ...
Stirling, Yates, Jr
(1872-1948) US naval officer and author, rising to the rank of Rear Admiral; he should not be confused with his father, Yates Stirling (1843-1929), also a Rear Admiral. He is of sf interest for various stories and essays about the role of the navy in any Future War, the first of these probably being "With the Coming of the Dawn" in The Bellman for 23 November 1907. His Yellow Peril tales, with Japan the preferred adversary, ...
Human Vapour, The
Japanese film (1960). Original title Gasu Ningen Daiichigō. Toho. Directed by Ishirō Honda. Written by Takeshi Kimura. Cast includes Tatsuya Mihashi, Fuyuki Murakami, Keiko Sata, Yoshio Tsuchiya and Kaoru Yachigusa. 91 minutes. Colour. / A car chase following a bank robbery ends with the criminal's vehicle going off the road and crashing: the police find the car empty, yet no footprints nearby. When another bank is robbed the metal gate ...
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 ...