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Friday 17 January 2025
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.
Site updated on 13 January 2025
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Cell, The
Film (2000). New Line Cinema presents a Caro-McLeod/Radical Media production in association with Katira Productions GmbH & Co. KG and Avery Pix. Directed by Tarsem Singh. Written by Mark Protosevich. Cast includes Dylan Baker, Vincent D'Onofrio, Colton James, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Jennifer Lopez, Tara Subkoff, Jake Thomas, Vince Vaughn and Jake Weber. 107 minutes. Colour. / A child psychologist (see Psychology) and an FBI agent (see ...
Dinosaur Times
US tabloid-size Media Magazine printed on newsprint. Publisher: Larry Brill. Editor: Edward Summer. Three quarterly issues in 1993. / According to publisher Brill, the launching of Dinosaur Times in the same year as Jurassic Park (1993) was a coincidence, the magazine having been planned for about two years. Aimed without reservations at children, it featured contests, Games and ...
Gauger, Rick
Working name of US author Richard C Gauger (1942- ), who began publishing sf with "The Vacuum-Packed Picnic" for Omni in September 1979. His sf novel, Charon's Ark (1987), intriguingly depicts the hijacking of a 747 full of students, which is taken to Charon, the hollowed-out moon of Pluto, a Macrostructure constructed by Aliens to preserve Earth's ...
White Holes
Item of Terminology denoting proposed cosmic counterparts of Black Holes. A series of theoretical papers in the 1970s suggested that for every black hole there must somewhere else – perhaps at the far end of a connecting Wormhole – be a corresponding white hole gushing energy out into the Universe in the same way that a black hole would suck it in. The idea was popularized by John ...
Black, Ladbroke
(1877-1940) UK author of much boys' fiction, often as Lionel Day or Paul Urquhart, and thrillers, including some Sexton Blake Library novels, including The Strange Affair of the Rejuvenation Club (1928 chap) as Anonymous, in which the sf element turns out to be a criminous hoax; he also wrote occasionally as Ladbroke Lionel Day Black. He had begun publishing as early as 1902, though he put nothing of sf interest into book form until ...
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 ...