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Friday 7 February 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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Sarrantonio, Al
(1952-2025) US editor and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Ahead of the Joneses" in Asimov's for March 1979. Much of his work was horror, sometimes tinged with sf (see Horror in SF), including his first novel, The Worms (1985), a Gothic tale set in Massachusetts with hints of H P Lovecraft; and the Equipoisal Moonbane ...
Killers from Space
Film (1954; vt Aliens from Space). Planet Filmways, Inc/RKO Radio Pictures. Produced and directed by W Lee Wilder. Written by William Raynor from an original story by Myles Wilder. Cast includes Barbara Bestar, John Frederick (credited as John Mitchell), Frank Gerstle, Peter Graves and James Seay. Narrator: Mark Scott. 71 minutes. Black and white. / While observing an atomic ...
Ishiguro, Kazuo
(1954- ) Japanese-born author in the UK since 1960, his first work being three stories, all ostensibly nonfantastic, for Invitation 7: Stories by New Writers (anth 1981) edited anonymously. He soon became known as a novelist of fictions only superficially obedient to the strictures against the fantastic maintained (in the twentieth century) by an insecure British literary establishment. Indeed, since the publication of his most famous tale, ...
Miller, Jimmy
Working name of US author born Jane Curley (? - ), married to Warren Miller from 1958 until his death. The Big Win (1969) is a noisy but sometimes effective Post-Holocaust quest story which moves eventually into space, as the protagonists search for the Chinese war criminal who caused the manufactured Pandemic that has decimated the rest of ...
La Salle, Victor
A House Name used on early paperback sf novels published by John Spencer and Co. (later Badger Books); all this publisher's 1951-1954 titles were bylined either La Salle or Karl Zeigfreid, another Spencer house name. Menace from Mercury (1954) was the first-published novel of the prolific R L Fanthorpe (his only La Salle title). ...
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 ...