SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 10 December 2024
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 9 December 2024
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
de Valda, F W
(1884-1964) UK entrepreneur, pilot and author of two sf novels: Children of the Sun (1934), in which ultra-short waves from a distant star, when projected onto a screen, work as a Time Viewer, giving contemporary humans visual access to Hernando Cortez's savage conquest of Mexico; and The Treasure of Atíl (1934), a Young Adult tale whose young protagonists use various ...
Burkett, William R, Jr
(1943- ) US author and journalist. He began publishing sf with Sleeping Planet (July-September 1964 Analog; 1965), which very competently tells a hard-edged tale of conflict between the small Terran Federation and the huge Llralan Empire. The Llralans, having undeserved access to a narcotic dust, spray the Earth, putting all but a very few humans to sleep (see Invasion); in the best ...
Minto, William
(1845-1893) Scottish philosopher, academic, journalist and author whose sf novel, The Crack of Doom: A Novel (August 1885-June 1886 Blackwood's Magazine; 1886 3vols), portentously invokes the Disaster threatened by an approaching Comet to shape, intermittently, an otherwise prosaic (and conspicuously dithery) plot; in the event, the End of the World is averted. This novel should ...
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
Film (2017). EuropaCorp presents a Valerian SAS and TF1 Films production with the participation of OCS and TF1 and in association with the Belga Film Fund, BNP Paribas, Fundamental Films, Novo Pictures, Orange Studio, River Road Entertainment and Universum Film GmbH. Directed by Luc Besson. Written by Besson, based on the Comic series Valérian and Laureline (November 1967-March 2018) by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières. Cast ...
Whaley, John Corey
(1984- ) US author of Young Adult fiction; his impressive first novel, Where Things Come Back (2011), is nonfantastic. But his second, Noggin (2014), depicts the Near Future surgical removal of its teenage protagonist's head (see Brain in a Box) after he has died of leukaemia, and Cryogenically stored for several ...
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 ...