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Thursday 12 March 2026
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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Fyne, Neal
A probable pseudonym of an unidentified UK author (? -? ) known only for a Lost World tale, The Land of the Living Dead: A Narrative of the Perilous Sojourn There of George Cowper, Mariner, in the Year 1835 (1897), set on an uncharted Island ruled by a tyrant – the Mighty Justin – who controls his subjects by possession of the antidote to the ...
Gilson, Charles
(1878-1943) UK soldier and author, who sometimes signed early books as Captain Charles Gilson and later publications as Major Charles Gilson, and whose tales for young male English readers are riddled with the class, racial and imperialist assumptions of his era. He is best known for fantasies like The Cat and the Curate: A Phenomenal Experience (1934), in which a Cat is transformed into a seductive Middle Eastern lady, and for ...
Rice, Christopher
(1978- ) US author, son of Anne Rice, most of whose work has been fantasy and supernatural horror; some is in collaboration with his mother, with whom he continued her standalone The Mummy; Or, Ramses the Damned (1989) as the series Ramses the Damned [see Checklist below]. / He is of sf interest for the Burning Girl sequence beginning with Bone Music (2018), much of it reads like the considerably ...
Seconds
Film (1966). Paramount/Joel/Gibraltar. Directed by John Frankenheimer. Written by Lewis John Carlino, from Seconds (1963) by David Ely. Cast includes Will Geer, Rock Hudson, Salome Jens and John Randolph. 106 minutes. Black and white. / A middle-aged businessman (Randolph) pays a large sum to have his death faked and his youth restored by futuristic surgery (see ...
Moudy, Walter
(1929-1973) US lawyer and author who published only a few sf stories after the debut of his sole novel, No Man on Earth (1964), a rather compellingly told story in which a man born of a human mother and an Alien father (see Biology; Exogamy) must seek out his destiny. His first short story was "The Dreamer" (April 1965 Fantastic); two others appeared in ...
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 ...