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Thursday 19 June 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for what we mean by Science Fiction; here for the masthead; here for some Statistics; here for the 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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Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Brooks, Byron A
(1845-1911) US inventor (he invented the shift key for the typewriter) and author of Earth Revisited (1893), a Sleeper Awakes tale which espouses a somewhat garbled revision of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888); the reawakened protagonist, after falling in love with his nurse, realizes that she is the Reincarnation of a lost love. All ends well. [JC]
Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman
Made-for-tv movie (1993), first screened December 1993. Home Box Office/Warner Bros Television/Bartleby Ltd. Produced by Debra Hill. Directed by Christopher Guest. Written by Joseph Dougherty, based on the screenplay of Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958) written by Mark Hanna. Cast includes Daniel Baldwin, Christi Conaway, Frances Fisher, Daryl Hannah and William Windom. 89 minutes. Colour. / This is a remake of a rather dim affair from 1958 with (approximately) the ...
Tucker, Horace
(1849-1911) UK-born minister and author, in Australia from 1861, whose marginally-sf Utopia, The New Arcadia: An Australian Story (1894), was based on the real-life Tucker Village Settlements, which he had co-founded and which existed from 1892 to 1894. The practical impediments to success in the real settlements are melodramatized in the novel, where modestly advanced Technology and Christian ordinances are nullified by a ...
Nolan, William F
(1928-2021) US author and editor who trained and for a time practised as a commercial artist; he also raced cars, publishing several books on the subject. Nolan first became active in sf Fandom in the 1950s, cofounding the San Diego Science Fantasy Society, being a staff member for the Fanzine Rhodomagnetic Digest, publishing The Ray Bradbury Review (including his own first story "The Immortal Ones: A Satire" in 1952), and ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...