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Friday 13 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.
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Coutinho, Albino
(1860-1940) Writer and historian from Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost State of Brazil. He wrote a historical chronicle, Marcha da divisão do Norte: para a história ["March of the North division: for History"] (1896), about the 1893 revolution when Rio Grande clashed with the central government and was defeated. His only incursion into sf is A Liga dos Planetas ["The League of Planets"] (1923), which is considered the ...
Page, Thomas
(1942- ) US author whose first novel was The Hephaestus Plague (1973), filmed as Bug (1975), a tale which starts strongly, with vivid descriptions of the effect of an irruption from Underground of a new species of beetle capable of emitting fire, but which weakens when it begins to deal with a Scientist who becomes overfascinated with these beetles, which seem to ...
Foster, David
(1944- ) Australian author, much of whose work hovers close to the fantastic (see Equipoise), like Moonlite (1981), through whose floridly picaresque structure an exorbitant vision of the history of Australian immigration can be discerned, or The Adventures of Christian Rosy Cross (1986), a tale reminiscent of the work of Thomas Pynchon whose protagonist (1378-1483) is (or is ...
Gears of War
Videogame (2006). Epic Games (EG). Designed by Cliff Bleszinski. Platforms: XB360 (2006); Win (2007). / Gears of War is a squad-based Third Person Shooter which shares much with the same developers' earlier First Person Shooter Unreal (1998). The setting is an interstellar colony planet, ravaged by subterranean ...
Kane, James J
(1837-1921) Canadian-born US Naval officer from 1861 until his retirement in 1896, rising as chaplain to the rank of Rear Admiral. Ilian; Or, the Curse of the Old South Church of Boston: A Psychological Tale of the Late Civil War (1888) is more a Gothic tale than an sf exploration into abnormal Psychology, but its ornate workings out of a plot based on genetic determinism give it some interest. [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 ...