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Tuesday 9 June 2026
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.
Site updated on 8 June 2026
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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Munro, C K
Pseudonym of UK civil servant (eventually Principal Assistant Secretary at the British Ministry of Labour) and playwright Charles Walden Kirkpatrick MacMullan (1889-1973), whose The Mountain; Or, the Story of Captain Yevan: A Symbolic Drama (1926) combines Utopia and Ruritania in its use of a fictitious City-state in the eastern heart of Europe as an arena for charged, symbolic discourse. ...
Price, Bruce Deitrick
(? - ) US artist, journalist and author, active from the early 1980s; of his various work, fiction and nonfiction, Frankie (2022) is of sf interest through its tracing of the creation of a female Android whose amiability does not fend off disaster. [JC]
Monsters [film]
Film (2010). Vertigo Films. Written and directed by Gareth Edwards. Cast includes Whitney Able and Scoot McNairy. 94 minutes. Colour. / A returning probe carrying samples from the geothermal oceans of Europa (see Jupiter) has crashed in central America, which is now infested with giant cephalopods in an international quarantine zone. Cynical photojournalist McNairy is reluctantly charged with delivering his boss's daughter (Able) to safety in the US before ...
Gilbert, John
(1926- ) US author whose sf novel, Aiki (1986), sets a gladiatorial martial-arts tale in twenty-first-century New York. [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 ...