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Friday 13 September 2024
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 9 September 2024
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Prophecy
Film (1979). Paramount. Directed by John Frankenheimer. Written by David Seltzer. Cast includes Armand Assante, Richard A Dysart, Robert Foxworth and Talia Shire. 102 minutes. Colour. / A mercuric fungicide used by a Maine pulp-mill under the directorship of Bethel Isely (Dysart) has mutagenic effects, bringing Minimata disease and miscarriages to the local Native Americans – who are led by John Hawks ...
Buis, Lela E
(? - ) US author who has also written as by L Crittenden and Lee Crittenden; she began to publish work of genre interest with "GP Venture" as by L Crittenden in Abortion Stories: Fiction on Fire (anth 1992) edited by Rick Lawler, assembling her short work in collections beginning with Desperate Lives (coll 2013), which was gathered together with other volumes as Moonshadows: A Collection of Short Stories (omni ...
Revis, Beth
(? - ) US author of the Across the Universe sequence, beginning with Across the Universe (2011), a Generation Starship tale for the Young Adult market, whose main action occurs about half a century before reaching Alpha Centauri, after a teenage girl awakens early from Cryogenic sleep to find a complexly dysfunctional ...
Rickett, Joseph Compton
(1847-1919) UK industrialist, lay preacher, politician (Liberal MP from 1895 until his death, holding Cabinet office from 1916) and author, born Joseph Rickett, who also wrote as by Maurice Baxter; he was knighted in 1907 and changed his name to Compton-Rickett in 1908. His sf novel The Quickening of Caliban: A Modern Story of Evolution (1893) suggests that a Lost Race of Homo sapiens – more natural (i.e., perhaps, less evolved) than ...
Porter, David Dixon
(1813-1891) US naval officer, the second to be appointed Admiral, a prominent figure in the American Civil War, later superintendent of the Naval Academy at Annapolis; of several novels published late in his life, The Adventures of Harry Marline; Or, Notes from an American Midshipman's Lucky Bag (1885) is a Lost Race tale for boys, involving Monsters of the deep and other strange encounters. [JC]
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 ...