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Saturday 7 September 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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Wray, Phoebe
(1935- ) US actor, environmentalist and author whose Jemma's World sequence opening with Jemma7729 (2008) depicts the life in the twenty-third century of a young female protagonist who discovers that the misogyny and oppressiveness of the enclosed Dystopia of her birth can be rebelled against, and escaped from. Communal life outside the walls is described comfortingly (see Feminism). [JC]
Cobban, J MacLaren
(1849-1903) UK author, of some interest for Master of His Fate (October-December 1889 Blackwood's Magazine; 1890), whose protagonist, tortured by the need vampirically to drain the life energy of others to maintain his own Immortality, confesses all to an expert in the field of animal magnetism; and then – convulsively aged into an old man, as always happens before he feeds – kills himself. The Tyrants of Kool-Sim ...
Rose Red
Short film (1994). BFI Production, Channel 4, Konnick Films. Directed by Simon Pummell. Written by Simon Ings and Simon Pummell. Cast includes Jennifer Calvert, Carolyn Choa, Simon Henshall and Sian Thomas. Colour. 19 minutes. / Detective Thomas Shaw (Henshall) has a recurring dream in which he pulls a woman from the sea, but then commits a violent act against her. In his waking life, he is called into a laboratory to investigate the theft of vials of ...
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Film (1977). Columbia. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Script credited to Spielberg but early draft actually written by Paul Schrader (1946- ), who disagreed with Spielberg over the treatment of his script and withdrew his name from the project. Cast includes Bob Balaban, Melinda Dillon, Richard Dreyfuss, Teri Garr, Cary Guffey and François Truffaut. 135 minutes. Colour. / After Star Wars ...
Trussoni, Danielle
(1973- ) US journalist, podcaster and author who remains best-known for the Angelology sequence of secret-history Bible-based fantasies beginning with Angelology (2010), featuring an age-long war between a group known as the Angelologists and the "Nephilim", bad angels who have bred with humans. In terms of the tonality of portentousness, the tales hover between the conspiracy novels of Dan Brown and the novels of David ...
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 ...