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Monday 23 May 2022
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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It Lives Again
Film (1978; vt It's Alive II). Larco/Warner Bros. Produced and directed by Larry Cohen. Written by Cohen. Cast includes Frederic Forrest, Kathleen Lloyd, John Marley and John P Ryan. 91 minutes. Colour. / This sequel to It's Alive (1974) has the Mutant child's father from the previous film warning another young couple that the pregnant wife may also produce a mutant baby and that the government is systematically terminating all such pregnancies, even though he has learned that the Monsters ...
Turner, Gerry
(1921-1982) US portrait photographer and author of fiction for the Young Adult market, including one sf novel, Stranger from the Depths (1967). Here the seeming last survivor of an ancient amphibian civilization from the Hollow Earth is discovered by a party of young US high-schoolers and their mentor, a college professor. The lizard-like being awakens (see Sleeper Awakes) and leads them to his people's Underground City; but there are other survivors in another city, and conflict ensues. ...
Stevermer, Caroline
(1955- ) US journalist and author whose fiction has been almost exclusively restricted to fantasy [see her entry in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below], though she began her writing career with the Nicholas Coffin series of medieval mysteries, starting with The Alchemist: Death of a Borgia (1981) as C J Stevermer. Of sf interest is River Rats (1992), a Young Adult tale set in a Ruined Earth America some time after a nuclear Holocaust; the action takes place ...
Cook, Diane
(? - ) US author whose short stories, assembled as Man v. Nature (coll 2014), manifest a twenty-first century sense that Homo sapiens's occupancy of the planet, and of our claims to pre-emptive Identity, are both fragile. The title story, set on a lifeboat in a vast expanse of ocean, follows the three survivors' attempts to make sense of the End of the World by imagining themselves creating a Television reality show. A similar apocalypse lurks outside the ...
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 tone is a genuinely Satirical assault on human mores. Benni has been likened to Robert Sheckley. [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 ...