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Saturday 29 January 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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Marks, Winston K
(1915-1979) US author of sf short stories who also wrote as Win Marks and used the pseudonyms Win Kinney and Ken Winney, each for just one story. He began publishing with "Mad Hatter" for Unknown in May 1940, but then, after "Manic Perverse" (October 1941 Astounding), was not heard of again until 1953 when he published The Water Eater (June 1953 Galaxy; 2010 ebook). He was then quite prolific, publishing nearly 60 further stories to 1959, with two final SF Magazine appearances in the late ...
Germany
[Coverage of Germany and Austria is in the process of being restructured, with the new entry Germany since 1990 dealing with the post-reunification scene and a separate entry in preparation for {East Germany}. What follows is only slightly revised from the 1993 edition of this encyclopedia.] This entry covers the whole of Germany, including the former GDR (East Germany). There is a separate entry for Austria, with which there is a small and inevitable overlap: many books by Austrian writers ...
Hambrook, Emerson C
Pseudonym of UK author George Makgill (1868-1926), whose Future War novel, The Red To-Morrow (1920), traces the consequences of a 1942 war against Germany, as Jews and immigrants riot in the streets of London, almost bringing down a decent government. There are moments of Satire throughout, directed at targets, including George Bernard Shaw, whom the author saw as culpable members of the intellectual left. An earlier tale, Outside and Overseas: Being the History of Captain Mungo Ballas, Styled ...
Gladiatorerna
Film (1968; vt The Peace Game; vt The Gladiators). Sandrews/New Line. Directed by Peter Watkins. Written by Nicholas Gosling, Watkins. Cast includes Frederick Danner, Björn Franzen, Kenneth Lo and Arthur Pentelow. 105 minutes, cut to 91 minutes. Colour. / Watkins uses his customary cinema-verité approach in this Swedish film about a Near Future in which, as a surrogate for full-scale war, small teams of soldiers fight it out under the guidance of a Computer. He generates ...
Rochelle, Warren
(1954- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "A Peaceful Heart" in Aboriginal Science Fiction for May-June 1989; the Changeling sequence, beginning with Harvest of Changelings (2007), is fantasy. Of sf interest is The Wild Boy (2001), an Invasion tale in which spacefaring Extraterrestrials turn Earth in a kind of planetary Zoo as the first stage in their plans to Uplift Homo sapiens into emotional maturity: defined in terms of the domesticated ...
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 ...