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Saturday 15 February 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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Moore, Chris
(1947-2025) Prolific UK artist, known to the public primarily for his hard-edged treatment of Hard SF subjects, although in fact he produced covers in different styles for all sorts of other genres as well, including illustrations of record sleeves for artists as diverse as Rod Stewart, Fleetwood Mac, Status Quo and Pentangle. What impressed most about Moore's sf art was not just the photographic realism but the sense of scale, achieved largely through a ...
Merwin, Sam, Jr
(1910-1996) US author, whose name has been given, in error, as W Samuel Merwin or W S Merwin, son of the writer W Samuel Merwin (1874-1936); neither Merwin should be confused with W S Merwin (William Stanley Merwin, 1927- ), the US Poet Laureate for 2011 whose The Folding Cliffs: A Narrative (1998), a novel in verse, treats Hawaiian history in mythopoeic terms. Sam Merwin Jr's first sf story was "The Scourge Below" for ...
Fisher, James P
(? - ) US author whose sf novel The Great Brain Robbery (1970) is a rather lightweight adventure in which an Alien inveigles a student to its home planet, where it has nefarious uses for his unusual brain. [JC]
Monkey Business
Film (1952). Twentieth Century Fox. Directed by Howard Hawks. Written by Ben Hecht, I A L Diamond, Charles Lederer. Cast includes Charles Coburn, Cary Grant, Hugh Marlowe, Marilyn Monroe and Ginger Rogers. 97 minutes. Black and white. / Made only a year after The Thing (though his direction of the latter was uncredited), Hawks's second sf film is one of the classic screwball comedies. Grant plays a staid ...
Starfarers of Catan
Board Game (1999). Catan. Designed by Klaus Teuber. / Starfarers of Catan is a spinoff from Settlers of Catan (1995 Catan) designed by Klaus Teuber, which was the first product of the "German School" of Board Game design to achieve mass popularity outside continental Europe. German style games such as Settlers are characterized by an emphasis on ease of use and playability over simulational ...
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 ...