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Friday 17 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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Corman, Roger
(1926-2024) US film-maker, a number of whose films are sf. Born in Los Angeles, he graduated in engineering from Stanford University in 1947, and spent a period in the US Navy and a term at Oxford University before going to Hollywood, where he began to write screenplays; his first sale was Highway Dragnet (1954), a picture he coproduced. He soon formed his own company and launched his spectacularly low-budget career. From 1956 he was regularly associated with ...
Fodor, Ronald V
(1944- ) US professor of geology at North Carolina State University and author of much nonfiction [mostly for younger readers and not listed below] as well as a Near Future tale of averted Disaster, Impact! (1979) with G J Taylor, in which a meteor threatens Earth. [JC/DRL]
Peacock, Thomas Love
(1785-1866) UK businessman, poet and author, with the East India Company 1819-1856, active initially as a poet from before 1805; his first full-length fiction, Headlong Hall (dated 1816 but 1815), is a discussion novel or symposium, set in the Welsh country estate of Squire Harry Headlong ab-Rhaiader, the Gothic description of which is fantastically exaggerated; the tale features a series of monomaniacal talking heads, whose individual maggots govern their names and natures and ...
Živković, Zoran
(1948- ) Serbian publisher, researcher, translator and author; his 1982 doctoral dissertation for Belgrade University, "The Appearance of Science Fiction as a Genre of Artistic Prose", was published in his Savremenici budućnosti ["Contemporaries of the Future"] (anth 1983), along with some of the stories he discusses. He has translated more than seventy sf books and published more than 200 books under his Polaris imprint, the first privately ...
Woodruff and the Schnibble of Azimuth
Videogame (1994; vt The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble in the US). Coktel Vision (CV). Designed by Muriel Tramis, Stéphane Fournier, Pierre Gilhodes. Platforms: Win. / Woodruff is a graphical Adventure with the ambience of a satirical cartoon. Long after a devastating nuclear war, humanity has returned to the surface world from its underground refuges to find that a new intelligent ...
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 ...