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Wednesday 15 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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Stasis Field
A variation on the traditional sf Force Field which provides an advanced form of Suspended Animation, first introduced in Robert A Heinlein's Beyond This Horizon (April-May 1942 Astounding as by Anson MacDonald; 1948). Time does not pass within such a field and its living contents will emerge, when the field ceases to ...
Farley, Ralph Milne
Pseudonym of US constitutional lawyer, author and teacher Roger Sherman Hoar (1887-1963) for all his sf work except two 1938 stories published in Amazing as by Lt John Pease. Hoar was educated at Harvard and had a remarkably varied career, which included teaching such subjects as mathematics and engineering, inventing a system of aiming large guns by the stars, and serving as a Massachusetts state senator. His early sf work in the Pulp ...
Meyer, Nicholas
(1945- ) US screenwriter and sometime director, known especially for Time After Time (1979), for his work on the original-series phase of the Star Trek film cycle, and latterly for his screen adaptations of non-sf works by Philip Roth. Beginning as a publicist, in which capacity he wrote a making-of book for Love Story (1971), he made an amusing debut ...
Cyberpunk 2077
Videogame (2020). CD Projekt. Directed by Adam Badowski and Konrad Tomaszkiewicz. Story director Marcin Blacha. Written by Tomasz Marchewka and Jakub Szamalek, additional writers include Alexsandra Motyka, Magdalena Zych, based on the game created by Michael "Mike" Pondsmith. Cast includes Robbie Daymond, Gavin Drea, Jason Hightower, Rome Kanda, Hideo Kimura, Cherami Leigh, Jane Perry, Alix Wilton Regan, Keanu Reeves, Carla Tassara and Emily Woo Zeller. ...
Bade, William L
(1928-2005) US academic, physicist (he did work for NASA) and author, who began publishing Hard SF stories with "Advent" for Astounding in January 1948, beginning a short series ending with "The Eight Hundredth Hundred-Day" (Fall 1953 Fantastic Worlds). He wrote three other stories, none remarkable. [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 ...