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Sunday 22 June 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for what we mean by Science Fiction; here for the masthead; here for some Statistics; here for the 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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Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Chronopolis
French/Polish animated film (1982). Production du Cirque, Acteurs Auteurs Associés (AAA), Institut National de l'Audiovisuel (INA). Directed and written by Piotr Kamler. Music by Luc Ferrari. Colour. / First shown at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, this film exists in two forms: a 67-minute version released in the US in 1983 with narration by Michael Lonsdale and a co-writing credit for Gabrielle Althen (this presumably ...
Taken
US tv miniseries (2002). Created and written by Leslie Bohem. Producers include Steven Spielberg, James Lima, and Julie Herlocker. Directors include Breck Eisner, John Fawcett, and Tobe Hooper. Cast includes Joel Gretsch as Owen Crawford, Steve Burton as Russell Keys, Catherine Dent as Sally Clarke, Eric Close as John, Andy Powers as Eric Crawford, Ryan Hurst as Tom Clarke, Anton Yelchin as Jacob Clarke, Desmond Harrington as Jesse Keys, Heather ...
McAlister, Hugh
(? -? ) Unidentified US author, possibly pseudonymous, among whose several novels for the juvenile market (see Children's SF), two are of sf interest: The Flight of the Silver Ship: Around the World Aboard a Giant Dirigible (1930), a trip accomplished in nineteen days; and Stand By: The Story of a Boy's Achievement in Radio (1930). In both volumes, Inventions slightly in ...
Wells, Catherine [2]
(1872-1927) UK author, married to H G Wells from 1895 until her death. Her fiction was occasional, usually fantasy or supernatural; what seems to be a sophisticated indifference to generic boundaries (see Equipoise) marks her short work, as assembled in The Book of Catherine Wells (coll 1928), edited by H G Wells. An awareness of this insouciance is certainly essential to any reading of her ...
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 ...