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Friday 7 October 2022
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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Werewolf, The
Film (1956). Clover Productions. Produced by Sam Katzman. Directed by Fred F Sears. Narrated by Sears. Cast includes Joyce Holden (Amy), S John Launer, George Lynn, Don Megowan, Steven Ritch and Eleanore Tanin. 79 minutes. Black and white. / Unscrupulous Scientists Dr Emery Forrest (Launer) and Dr Morgan Chambers (Lynn) have been secretly working on a serum meant to immunize humans against radiation poisoning in case the Cold War intensifies. Coming upon Duncan Marsh (Ritch) just after he ...
Croatia
Croatian sf in its infancy (especially after the nineties) is not very different from the East European fiction and we can compare it to the Russian school of fiction. In the early days of sf in Croatia, writers dealt with adventurous and utopian themes, but later their focus shifted more to existential and social issues, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Croatian Patriotic war in the nineties; typically they now wrote about the life of the "little man" who is repressed by ...
Labatut, Benjamin
(1980- ) Netherlands-born author, most of whose life has been led in Latin America, currently Chile; his work, mostly speculative texts where an interlacing of fiction and nonfiction approaches to the fate of the world, may at times rhetorically evoke Futures Studies, though for the most part his incipits are nonfantastic. Some of the stories assembled in his first book, La Antártica empieza aqui ["Antarctica Starts Here"] (coll 2010), treat the anguish of the ...
Ammaniti, Niccolò
(1966- ) Italian author, most of whose work has no fantastic content. Anna (2015; trans Jonathan Hunt 2017) is set in a Near Future world devastated by a Pandemic which kills anyone who has reached sexual maturity (ie the age of fourteen), and any child who lives long enough to reach that point during the course of the tale. The young protagonist attempts to survive in the savage society of her peers in Sicily, most of whom go dementedly astray in their search for ...
Scientifiction
Early item of Terminology coined by Hugo Gernsback as a contraction of "scientific fiction" and thus defined by him in the first issue of Amazing Stories in April 1926 (see Definitions of SF). Gernsback dated his original coinage of the word to 1915, most probably referring to its appearance (in italics) in the opening paragraph of "Thought Transmission on Mars" (January 1916 Electrical Experimenter), the eighth episode of his Baron Muenchhausen's Scientific Adventures sequence. In 1924 he had ...
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 ...