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Sunday 3 May 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.
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Morris, Desmond
(1928-2026) UK ethologist, zoologist, surrealist painter and author who remains best known for popularizations of sociobiology, arguing in The Naked Ape: A Zoologist's Study of the Human Animal (1967) that human behaviour could be usefully studied (though not comprehensively defined) through ethological comparisons with our primate relatives. He is of some sf interest for his only novel, Inrock (1983; exp 2013), whose young protagonist enters a surreal ...
Lightning Comics
US Comic (1940-1942). Ace Magazines. 10 issues. Artists include Harry Anderson, Jack Binder, Red Holmdale and Jim Mooney. Script writers include Maurice Gutwirth, Cliff Howe and Mark Schneider. Each issue has 68 pages, usually with seven long strips and one short text story, plus occasional short strips or text pieces as filler. / Lightning Comics was a retitling of Sure-Fire Comics, which had 4 issues in 1940 (the ...
Phelps, Gilbert
(1915-1993) UK broadcaster and author who spent much of his career in the BBC, as a radio producer and in other roles between 1945 and 1960. His first story, "I Have Lived a Hundred Years" in The Faber Book of West Country Stories (anth 1951), prefigured the thematic material of his first sf novel, The Centenarians (1958), whose protagonists attempt – in the end unsuccessfully – to translate their eminence in the arts and sciences into lives safely ...
Sorcerers, The
Film (1967). Tigon Film Distributors (UK)/Allied Artists Pictures (US). Produced by Patrick Curtis and Tony Tenser. Directed by Michael Reeves. Written by Reeves and Tom Baker from an idea by John Burke (see Jonathan Burke). Cast includes Boris Karloff, Catherine Lacey and Ian Ogilvy. 86 minutes. Colour. / Former medical hypnotist Professor Marcus Monserrat (Karloff), disgraced by an unexplained incident some years ...
Rodriguez, Robert
(1968- ) US filmmaker who has repeatedly straddled sf boundaries with other genres: Horror in The Faculty (1998), which draws on and quotes Robert A Heinlein's The Puppet Masters (1951); 1970s exploitation cinema plus Zombies and Monster Movie tropes in ...
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 ...