SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 5 November 2024
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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Hildebrandt, The Brothers
Working name for the team of American artists Gregory J Hildebrandt (1939-2024) and Timothy Mark Allen Hildebrandt (1939-2006), identical twin brothers, although they also worked separately using the working names Greg Hildebrandt and Tim Hildebrandt. They will forever be regarded primarily as the definitive illustrators of J R R Tolkien because of the famous Tolkien calendars that featured their paintings of his characters; oddly enough, except for one 1975 ...
Bermuda Depths, The
Made-for-tv film (1978). ABC television network. Rankin/Bass Productions-Tsubura Productions. Directed by Tom (Tsugunobu) Kotani. Cast includes Burl Ives, Leigh McCloskey, Connie Sellecca and Carl Weathers. Written by William Overgard from a story by Arthur Rankin Jr. 100 minutes, often cut to 90 minutes. Colour. / Something of an oddball companion film to The Last Dinosaur (1977), The Bermuda Depths offers a fairly ...
Hypnosis
This mildly controversial and frequently misrepresented technique of Psychology – also known in its early days as mesmerism – is generally depicted in sf as very much more rapid and reliable than any known medical hypnosis. An extreme case is Edgar Allan Poe's "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" (December 1845 American Whig Review), whose titular subject dies but remains conscious even in decay until the ...
Fairman, Paul W
(1909-1977) US editor and author in several genres, including crime stories and erotica; active from around 1947. His first published sf story was "No Teeth for the Tiger" for Amazing in February 1950, and for some years thereafter he was a regular contributor to the Ziff-Davis magazines under his own name, the pseudonyms Robert Lee and Mallory Storm, and various house pseudonyms (see House Names), ...
Driou, Alfred
(1810-1880) French priest (apparently) and author, prolific under his own name and a variety of pseudonyms; of sf interest is Les Aventures d'un Aéronaute Parisien dans les Mondes Inconnus (1856; trans Brian Stableford as The Adventures of A Parisian Aeronaut In The Unknown Worlds 2012), though in fact the promised Fantastic Voyage of the solar system by aerostat gets no farther than ...
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 ...