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Tuesday 21 March 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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Monolith Monsters, The
Film (1957). Universal. Directed by John Sherwood. Written by Robert M Fresco (1930-2014) and Norman Jolley, based on a story by Jack Arnold and Fresco. Cast includes Lola Albright, Les Tremayne and Grant Williams. 77 minutes. Black and white. / In this rather good little film, crystals from a meteorite that has fallen near a small desert town grow and multiply rapidly when wet. They also cause death by absorbing all ...
Flecker, James Elroy
(1884-1915) UK poet, playwright and author best known for Hassan: The Story of Hassan of Bagdad and How He Came to Make the Golden Journey to Samarkand (1922), a Fantasy play with an Arabian Nights flavour, which further popularized a once-famous catch-phrase "We take the Golden Road to Samarkand" from his poem "The Golden Journey to Samarkand" in The Golden Journey to Samarkand (coll 1913 chap), about the yearning for the unattainable, ...
Slater, W H
(? -? ) UK author in whose sf novel, The Golden Load (1926), a scientist's Discovery of the secret of synthesizing gold (see Transmutation) leads to worldwide Disaster. [JC]
Overgard, William
(1926-1990) US Comics artist, screenwriter and author, active in the first capacity from around 1950; his screenplays include scripts for The Last Dinosaur (1977) and The Bermuda Depths (1978). As an author he is of sf interest for The Divide (1980), an Alternate History tale whose double ...
Forti, Kathy J
(?p- ) US psychologist, entrepreneur and author who is of sf interest for her STACKS sequence beginning with STACKS: Library of Truth (2022), whose primary (or at least initial) setting is the Library of Congress in Washington, where a portal has been opened into another Dimension which contains a secret Deep-Throat archive full of revelations about corruption up in the world, as well as holographs recording the whole ...
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 ...