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Friday 13 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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Longyear, Barry B
(1942-2025) US author and editor who ran a printing company with his wife before beginning to write in 1977, beginning to publish work of genre interest with "The Tryouts" in Asimov's for November/December 1978. Before his 1981 hospitalization for alcoholism and addiction to prescription drugs – an experience which formed the basis of his non-sf novel Saint Mary Blue (1988) – he had already published prolifically, sometimes as by Frederick ...
Games Workshop
UK company specializing in fantasy-adventure Role Playing Games, Wargames and models. Its related Magazine White Dwarf (June/July 1977-current), initially covering the entire field of fantasy and sf RPG and Board Games, narrowed its focus from the later 1980s to deal only with Games Workshop's own miniatures-based Wargame products ...
Horrors of Spider Island
Film (1959, released 1960; vt The Body in the Web; vt It's Hot in Paradise). Produced by Gaston Hakim and Wolf C Hartwig. Directed by Fritz Böttger (credited as Jamie Nolan). Written by Böttger, Eldon Howard and Albert G Miller. Cast includes Alex D'Arcy, Helga Franck, Dorothee Parker (credited as Norma Townes) and Barbara Valentin. 89 minutes, sometimes cut to 82 minutes. Black and white. / Nightclub owner Gary (D'Arcy) interviewing assorted women for ...
Evans, Linda
(1958- ) US author whose first novel Sleipnir (1994) is a fantasy in which a modern GI intervenes in the world of Norse Gods and Mythology as Ragnarok looms. With Robert Asprin, Evans co-wrote the Time Scout sequence of Time Travel adventures beginning with Time Scout (1995), in which accidentally ...
Haggard, H Rider
(1856-1925) UK civil servant, lawyer, agricultural expert and author. Haggard spent the years 1875-1881 in the Colonial Service in South Africa, where he gained much of the material for his fiction. On his return to the UK he read for the bar while at the same time beginning to produce novels and other work. With his third and fourth published novels, King Solomon's Mines (1885) and the even more successful She: A History of Adventure (2 October 1886-8 January 1887 ...
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 ...