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Friday 18 April 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.
Site updated on 14 April 2025
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Alt Hist
UK low-paying Magazine which ran for ten issues from October 2010 to February 2017; published and edited by Mark Lord in Hertfordshire, at irregular intervals once or twice a year, available both as a Print Magazine and Ebook. It was primarily intended as a magazine of historical fiction but also featured Alternate History which usually provided about half the ...
Barjavel, René
(1911-1985) French author, active in later life as a screenwriter and journalist. His first novel to be translated, Ravage (1943; trans Damon Knight as Ashes, Ashes 1967), describes a France driven inwards into rural quiescence in 2052 by a great Disaster, as the Sun becomes volatile, causing the sudden disappearance of electricity from the world; the corrupting effects of ...
Hunter, Jim
(1939- ) UK author of The Flame (1966), a Near Future tale set in a Dystopian Britain taken over by right-wing forces; nothing assuages the bleakness of the narrative and its message. Percival and the Presence of God (1978) is a fantasy about the Matter of Britain [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. ...
Stacy, Jan
(1948-1989) US author of Military SF novels, including the first four volumes of the Doomsday Warrior sequence in collaboration with Ryder Syvertsen under the joint pseudonym Ryder Stacy; Syvertsen continued the series solo (see his entry for titles). Their only non-series collaboration appeared under their real names: The Great Book of Movie Monsters (1983). Writing as John Sievert, they began the ...
Man in the Moon
Film (1960). Allied Film Makers/Excalibur. Directed by Basil Dearden. Written by Bryan Forbes, Michael Relph, and Basil Dearden (uncredited). Cast includes Shirley Anne Field, John Glyn-Jones, Charles Gray, Michael Hordern, Kenneth More and John Phillips. 98 minutes. Black and white. / William Blood (More) is rejected as an experimental subject for research into the common cold because this imperturbable man never gets sick; but the head of the British moon project, Dr Davidson ...
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 ...