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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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Frankenstein Unbound
Film (1990; vt Roger Corman's Frankenstein Unbound). Warner Brothers. Directed by Roger Corman. Written by Corman, F X Feeney, based on Frankenstein Unbound (1973) by Brian W Aldiss. Cast includes Nick Brimble, Bridget Fonda, John Hurt, Michael Hutchence, Raul Julia, Jason Patric and Katherine Rabett. 85 minutes. Colour. / This philosophical (about the dangers of the Promethean impulse) Time-Travel horror/fantasy was the first film directed by Corman for 20 years. A twenty-first-century ...
Oldfield, Mike
(1953- ) English composer and performer, whose multi-layered, multi-instrumental and usually vocal-free work has enjoyed considerable commercial success. His first and perhaps most influential release, Tubular Bells (1973) was a fluently inventive, varied and musically charming piece, not least in its cod-caveman interlude "Piltdown Man". Of his many dozen subsequent releases, Oldfield's most straightforwardly science-fictional album is The Songs of Distant Earth (1994), ...
Stapledon, Olaf
(1886-1950) UK author and philosopher, born in the Wirral peninsula near Liverpool, where he spent the greater part of his life. In Waking World (1934) he admitted that he lived "chiefly on dividends and other ill-gotten gains". The name Olaf does not indicate foreign antecedents: his parents had been reading Carlyle's The Early Kings of Norway (coll 1875) when he was born. After studying at Balliol College, Oxford, he worked for a short period without enthusiasm in the family shipping office ...
Minamiyama Hiroshi
Pseudonym of Yū Mori (1936- ), Japanese translator, author and editor. An early contributor to the Fanzine Uchūjin while still a student of German literature at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, he dropped out of college after being offered a job at the publisher Hayakawa Shobō through an introduction by Takumi Shibano. Working under the editor-in-chief Masami Fukushima, Minamiyama shared the duties of selecting and translating sf from overseas, with ...
Whiteley, Elizabeth
(? -? ) UK author of The Devil's Throne (1903), whose protagonists, transfixed by a lamia, invade the realm of the Devil, which is behind the Moon, travelling there in an aircraft-like Spaceship; in the vicinity of the Throne, they meet the dead souls of some famous humans. [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 ...