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Tuesday 11 November 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for what we mean by Science Fiction; here for the masthead; here for some Statistics; here for the 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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Taylor, William Alexander
(1837-1912) US lawyer, editor, politician and author whose Utopia, Intermere (1901), carries its protagonist into the heart of an inland sea perhaps adjacent to Antarctica; it is clearly Atlantis. Its inhabitants, who have deliberately kept the world at bay, communicate through Telepathy; they have evolved a civilization featuring advances in science and ...
Wilson, Granville
(1912-2001) UK journalist and author, who should not be confused with the non-writer Leslie Granville Eyre Wilson (1912-2008). He is the author of three sf novels: Murder Goes Underground (1949), featuring a Death Ray, housed in an atomic car, which destroys other cars; plus two Young Adult tales, War of the Computers (1981), about troubles in Dystopia, and ...
Rikhye, Ravi
(1946- ) Indian author whose The Fourth Round Indo-Pak War (1982) is set in the Near Future, where the ongoing conflict between India and Pakistan escalates as the latter country begins to develop a nuclear capacity; outright War soon ensues. [JC]
Day the Fish Came Out, The
Film (1967). Michael Cacoyannis Productions/Twentieth Century Fox. Directed by Michael Cacoyannis. Written by Michael Cacoyannis. Cast includes Candice Bergen, Colin Blakely, Tom Courtenay, Ian Ogilvy and Sam Wanamaker. 109 minutes. Colour. / This Near-Future Greek/UK film takes off from a real-life incident in which the US Air Force accidentally lost two H-bombs off the coast of Spain. A NATO bomber crashes into the sea near a small Greek island, ...
Kagarlitski, Julius
(1926-2000) Russian critic and professor of European drama at the State Theatrical Institute in Moscow. One of the leading Russian critics to have a strong interest in sf, Kagarlitski published the first and most comprehensive study in the then USSR of an individual sf author: Gerbert Uells (1963; trans Moura Budberg as The Life and Thought of H.G. Wells 1966; considerably rev and exp vt Vgliadyvaias v griadushchee ["Staring into the Future"] 1989). He ...
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 ...