SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 24 September 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.
Site updated on 18 September 2023
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Terminal Man, The
Film (1974). Warner Bros. Produced, directed and written by Mike Hodges. Based on The Terminal Man (1972) by Michael Crichton. Cast includes Joan Hackett and George Segal. 107 minutes, cut to 104 minutes. Colour. / Segal plays a man who suffers from violent blackouts as a result of brain damage suffered in a car accident. Doctors use him as an experimental guinea pig: into his brain they insert electrodes linked to a tiny ...
Liu Cixin
(1963- ) Multiple award-winning Chinese author who swiftly shot to prominence in the People's Republic after the publication of his debut short story "Jing Ge" ["Whale Song"] (June 1999 Kehuan Shijie). A graduate of the North China Institute of Water Power and Hydroelectric Engineering, he inadvertently presents a rather traditional career path for Chinese science fiction writers, continuing to work as a senior ...
Benni, Stefano
(1947- ) Italian journalist and author who published several nonfiction books before releasing his first novel, Terra! (1983; trans Annapaoloa Cancogni 1985), set in a Post-Holocaust world racked by Nuclear Winter; the action moves from the Underground city of Paris to a race through space to occupy a new and Edenic planet. Governing the farcical ...
Hodge, T Shirby
Pseudonym of US author Roger Sherman Tracy (1841-1926). His sf novel, The White Man's Burden: A Satirical Forecast (1915), is set in 5000 CE, by which period the warlike and primitive white races (see Race in SF) have been restricted to North America while, in Black-dominated Africa, anarchism and scientific genius have generated a Utopian world. A white Invasion suffers ignominious defeat, and ...
Rackham, Martin
(? - ) UK author of The Source: Earth Voyage (1997), what may have been intended as the first volume of a series in which Aliens mount an Invasion of Earth in order to gain access to a desperately needed Power Source; but the sequence seems not to have progressed. [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 ...