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Tuesday 25 January 2022
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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Harper, Vincent
Pseudonym of Cuban-born US Episcopal minister (later Catholic priest and still later agnostic), lecturer, author and playwright Henry Austin Adams (1861-1931), who normally wrote as H Austin Adams. His sf novel, The Mortgage on the Brain: Being the Confessions of the Late Ethelbert Craft, MD (1905), describes an electric-shock treatment which alters personality beneficially and undermines many then-conventional views of the nature of the mind and Identity. The story is a melodramatic ...
From Beyond
Film (1986). Taryn/Empire. Executive producer Charles Band. Directed by Stuart Gordon. Written by Dennis Paoli, loosely based on "From Beyond" (June 1934 The Fantasy Fan) by H P Lovecraft. Cast includes Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton, Ken Foree, Carolyn Purdy-Gordon and Ted Sorel. 85 minutes. Colour. / With three of the same leading players, the same production team, and one of Lovecraft's fringe sf stories as its original, this is effectively a sequel to Re-Animator (1985), and was made ...
MacAulay, L
(? -? ) UK author of The Decadence: An Excerpt from "A History of the Triumph and Decay of England": Dateable 1949 (1929), most of whose focus is on issues of free trade, which is advocated. [JC]
Ashen Stars
Role Playing Game (2011). Pelgrane Press. Designed by Robin D Laws. / Ashen Stars is a Space Opera game which – like Trail of Cthulhu (2008), an earlier work which makes use of the same core mechanics – focuses on the solution of mysteries. As in Trail of Cthulhu, player characters can fail at any task except those required to reveal a clue relevant to their current conundrum. Discovering the truth behind the peculiar events with which sessions of the game generally begin is ...
Corlett, William
(1938-2005) UK actor, playwright and author, in the latter capacity mostly for older children, though much of his later work, which openly explores the lives of gay men, was written for adults. He is of sf interest mainly for the Gate of Eden trilogy, comprising The Gate of Eden (1974), an essentially associational tale which he adapted for Television as The Gate of Eden (1979). The Land Beyond (1975), which involves Timeslips; and Return to the Gate (1975), in which the young protagonist of ...
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 ...