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Friday 2 June 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.
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Capes, Bernard
(1854-1918) UK author, active from the late 1880s, initially writing as by Bevis Cane, his first novel, The Haunted Tower (1888), being under that name. Capes's first novel under his own name, The Mill of Silence (1897), is a complex supernatural tale, incorporating ghosts and hints of legendary upwellings. Some of his tales are of sf interest. At a Winter's Fire (coll 1899) includes "Moon Stricken" (December 1896 Cornhill Magazine), in which a ...
Flying Saucer Daffy
Short US film (1958). Columbia Pictures. Directed by Jules White. Written by Jack White (screenplay) and Warren Wilson (story). Cast includes Joe Besser, Gail Bonney, Diana Darrin, Larry Fine, Moe Howard Bek Nelson, and Emil Sitka. Seventeen minutes. Black and white. / After Joe (Besser) accidentally photographs a paper plate tossed into the sky, the other members of the Three Stooges, Moe (Howard) and Larry (Fine), take credit for the photograph and are given a $10,000 prize for ...
Coughlin, William J
(1929-1992) US defense attorney, judge and author, who also published as by Sean A Key. Of his several thrillers, The Destruction Committee (1971) is of sf interest for its portrait of a Near Future America in which a group of tough Vietnam veterans come together monthly to kill an undesirable, a vigilante procedure culminating in the decision to kill off the left-wing candidate for Vice President in the forthcoming election, deciding to do so on ...
Ballingrud, Nathan
(1970- ) US author, for many years exclusively of horror, much of it supernatural, almost always in the form of short stories. He began to publish work of genre interest with "Memories of Green" in Forbidden Lines for Fall 1992, with much of his work being assembled as North American Lake Monsters (coll 2013; vt Monsterland 2020) and Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell (coll 2019). A ...
Black Holes
Item of sf Terminology borrowed from Cosmology. The term was coined by the physicist John A Wheeler (1911-2008) in 1969 and adopted immediately and enthusiastically by sf writers. The concept of the black hole is quite complex, and is best approached by the layman through a reliable book of scientific popularization such as A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (1988) by Stephen W Hawking ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its listing of Pseudonyms. ...