SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 8 December 2023
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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Compton, D G
(1930-2023) UK author, born of parents who were both in the theatre; he increasingly lived in the USA after 1981. As Guy Compton, he published some unremarkable detective novels, beginning with Too Many Murderers (1962), and as by Frances Lynch produced some nonfantastic Gothics throughout his career; but soon turned to sf with tales almost always set in the Near Future, and anatomizing moral dilemmas within that arena: the future is very clearly ...
Cowboys & Aliens
Film (2011). Dreamworks Pictures, Universal Pictures, and Reliance Entertainment in association with Relativity Media present an Imagine Entertainment/KO Paper Products/Fairview Entertainment/Platinum Studios production. Directed by Jon Favreau. Written by Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman & Damon Lindelof and Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby; story by Fergus & Ostby and Steve Oedekerk, based on Cowboys and Aliens (graph 2006) by Scott ...
Robotboy
UK-French animated tv series (2005-2008). Alphanim, Cofinova 1, LuxAnimation. Created by Jan Van Rijsselberge. Directed by Charlie Bean, Bob Camp and Heath Kenny. Writers include Robert Mittenthal and Michael Rubiner. Voice cast includes Laurence Bouvard, Rupert Degas, Togo Igawa, Eiji Kusuhara and Lorraine Pilkington. 52 23-minute episodes, each containing two segments. Colour. / When Professor Moshimo (Igawa) invents Robotboy (Bouvard), a child-like ...
Cummings, M A
(1914-1999) US author of romances as Monette Cummings, and of short stories in various genres, her work of genre interest beginning with "The Brides of Ool" in Planet Stories in 1955. Her collection is Exile and Other Tales of Fantasy (coll 1968), which contains some Planetary Romances. [JC]
Lathe of Heaven, The
Made-for-tv film (1980). TV Laboratory WNET/13, New York, for PBS. Produced and directed by David R Loxton and Fred Baryzk. Teleplay Roger E Swaybill, Diane English, based on The Lathe of Heaven (March-May 1971 Amazing; 1971) by Ursula K Le Guin. Cast includes Margaret Avery, Kevin Conway and Bruce Davison. 120 minutes. Colour. / Made outside the commercial system for Public Television, this may be the ...
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 ...