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Thursday 9 May 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.
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Auster, Paul
(1947-2024) US translator, screenwriter and author, active from around 1970, who came to sudden attention – after years of unrecognized work, culminating in an undemanding Baseball mystery, Squeeze Play (1984) as by Paul Benjamin – with a series of Fabulations playing on detective genres and the French nouveau roman. City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and ...
Shadow on the Land
Made-for-tv film (1968; vt United States: It Can't Happen Here). Screen Gems for ABC-TV. Produced by Matthew Rapf. Created by Sidney Sheldon. Directed by Richard C Sarafian. Written by Nedrick Young, based on It Can't Happen Here (1935) by Sinclair Lewis. Cast includes Jackie Cooper, John Forsythe, Gene Hackman, Carol Lynley and Marc Strange. 100 minutes. Colour. / An unspecified national ...
Robot Jox
Film (1990). Empire. Directed by Stuart Gordon. Written by Joe Haldeman and Dennis Paoli. Cast includes Gary Graham, Anne-Marie Johnson, Paul Koslo, Hilary Mason and Robert Sampson. 82 minutes. Colour. / In a decimated Near Future world, conflicts are now resolved by "jox", popular idols who pilot the Robot colossi (see Mecha) ...
Hastings, Milo
(1884-1957) US nutritionist, editor – for many years involved in magazine projects with Bernarr Macfadden – and author, sometimes on agricultural subjects; The Dollar Hen (1909) is a nonfiction text about hens. With striking accuracy, his Future War sf stories centre on conflict between either Japan or Germany and the rest of the world. The first of them, "In the Clutch of the War-God: The Tale of ...
Temple, William F
(1914-1989) UK author who began his activities in the sf world before World War Two as an active fan, a member of the British Interplanetary Society and editor of its Bulletin, and a flatmate of Arthur C Clarke. He began to publish work of genre interest with "The Kosso" in Thrills (anth 1935) edited anonymously by Charles Birkin (1907-1986), a Horror in SF tale in which a tree, given ...
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 ...