SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 ...
Gamebook
Term used to describe printed works of fiction in which different paths can be followed through the story, leading to multiple endings, and in which some outcomes are considered superior to others, allowing for the possibility of "winning" or "losing" the book. The word itself was apparently coined by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone for The Warlock of Firetop Mountain (1982) (see ...
Cornwallis-West, G
(1874-1951) UK author, as well known for his marriages as for his fiction, his first (1900-1913) being to Jennie Churchill (1854-1921), mother of Sir Winston Churchill, whom he deserted for Mrs Patrick Campbell (1865-1940) as she was about to star in the London premiere of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion in 1914, and whom he deserted in turn in 1919, leaving huge debts behind. In his ...
Lathe of Heaven, The
Made-for-tv film (1980). TV Laboratory WNET/13, New York, for PBS. Produced and directed by David R Loxton and Fred Baryzk. Teleplay Roger E Swaybill, Diane English, based on The Lathe of Heaven (March-May 1971 Amazing; 1971) by Ursula K Le Guin. Cast includes Margaret Avery, Kevin Conway and Bruce Davison. 120 minutes. Colour. / Made outside the commercial system for Public Television, this may be the ...
Temporal Adventuress
A figure of late twentieth-century Fantastika, where she stands out against the male-dominated storylines that dominated adventure fiction in general, and tales of the fantastic in particular; more recently, women adventurers tend to appear without arousing special attention. The roots of the Adventuress can be traced back to the nineteenth century, where precursors can be detected in characters like H Rider Haggard's ...
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 ...