SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 12 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.
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Treasure Planet
1. Bulgarian animated film (1982; original title Planetata na sakrovishtata). Sofia Animation Studio. Directed by Rumen Petkov. Original voice cast unknown. Written by Boris Angelov and Yosif Peretz. 62 minutes. Colour. / This was the first full-length Bulgarian animated film, released twenty years before Disney's Treasure Planet (2002) – see 2 below – which was also a sf version of Robert Louis ...
Whitaker, David
(1928-1980) UK Television scriptwriter and editor who as the first story editor of Doctor Who oversaw the writing of this series' first 51 episodes (1963-1964) and contributed several scripts of his own in the mid- to late 1960s. Whitaker wrote the first Doctor Who novelization, Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks (1964; vt Doctor Who and the Daleks 1973). This well-crafted ...
McGhan, Barry
(1939- ) US fan and bibliographer who began to publish work of genre interest with "Andre Norton: Why Has She Been Neglected?" in Riverside Quarterly for January 1970. He is perhaps of greatest importance for the compilation Science Fiction and Fantasy Pseudonyms (1971 chap; var revs to 1979) [see Checklist below], a useful guide to Pseudonyms. ...
Tales of Terror from the Beyond
US letter-size saddle-stapled weird-fiction magazine printed on newsprint. Published by Charlton Comics. Editor: Patrick Mansuelli. One issue only, Summer 1964. / This scarce publication is not a Media Magazine as such, but seems popular among collectors of such periodicals. Most of the stories are by Stanton A Coblentz, including several reprints from 1947-1950 issues of ...
Coblentz, Stanton A
(1896-1982) US author and traditionalist poet who wrote polemics in defence of his rather bad verse, beginning with his MA thesis, privately published as The Poetic Revival in America (1917). He began his career proper in the early 1920s with book reviews for New York papers, a volume of poems, The Thinker and Other Poems (coll 1923), and Modern American Lyrics (anth 1924). Of the many volumes of verse that followed – almost always published ...
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 ...