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Friday 17 January 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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Host, The
Film (2013). IAV International in association with Silver Reel. Written and directed by Andrew Niccol. Based on The Host (2008) by Stephenie Meyer. Cast includes Jake Abel, Emily Browning (uncredited), Chandler Canterbury, William Hurt, Max Irons, Diane Kruger and Saoirse Ronan. 125 minutes. Colour. / A race of benign interstellar parasites (see Parasitism and Symbiosis), who carry out the ...
Hughes, Riley
(1914-1981) US author of a Ruined Earth tale, The Hills Were Liars (1955), an avowedly Catholic tale in which eight believers, many decades after the terminal wars begin in the 1960s, attempt to work out a way for the human species to survive under God. [JC]
Whiteside, Thomas
(1918-1997) UK-born journalist and author, in USA most of his life; most of his work, like The Tunnel Under the Channel (1972), is nonfiction. Much of this is focused on Ecological issues, as in Defoliation: What Are Our Herbicides Doing to Us? (1970). He is of sf interest for the Near Future novel Alone Through the Dark Sea (1964), in which three narratives interweave, each based on isolation: ...
Kipling, Arthur Wellesley
(1885-1947) US author of two Future-War novels. The New Dominion: A Tale of Tomorrow's War (1908), a Yellow Peril tale, pits the USA triumphantly against Japan and Germany, with the help of Great Britain; and The Shadow of Glory: Being a History of the Great War 1910-1911 (1910) unusually visualizes that the conflict so frequently predicted in Dreadful Warning tales of this period is in fact worldwide, ...
Hervey, Harry
(1900-1951) US author who supplied stories (though he did not always write the scripts) for such films as Shanghai Express (1932) and Road to Singapore (1940), and who early in his career wrote two Lost Race novels, both set in the romantic East, Caravans by Night: A Romance of India (1922) and The Black Parrot: A Tale of the Golden Chersonese (1923), the latter set in the Malay Peninsula. [JC]
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 ...