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Sunday 5 December 2021
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.
Site updated on 1 December 2021
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Lehr, Paul
(1930-1998) American artist. Lehr studied illustration at the prestigious Pratt Institute, where he worked under Stanley Meltzoff, an early influence on his art. His first sf cover – for the American edition of Jeffery Lloyd Castle's Satellite E One (1954) – is a realistic depiction of the construction of an unusually-shaped Space Station, and similar images of spacecraft, rendered mostly in shades of grey, are seen in other early covers for James Blish's Galactic Cluster (coll ...
Wharton, Michael
(1913-2006) UK journalist and author born Michael Bernhard Nathan, but taking his mother's surname in adulthood; he is best known for his anti-modern, deeply conservative, often hilarious Way of the Word newspaper columns (intermittently 1957-2006) written as by Peter Simple. These highly fantasticated columns show the influence of similar work by Beachcomber (see J B Morton) and Myles na Gopaleen (see Flann O'Brien), though not the latter's politics. Sheldrake (1958), his only novel, which is ...
McCardell, Roy L
(1870-?1961) US screenwriter and author, whose extremely early Tie, The Diamond from the Sky: A Romantic Novel (coll of linked stories 1916), puts in book form his own filmscript about an Asteroid with a great diamond at its heart which plummets into seventeenth-century western America. McCardell also appeared as himself in the live-action prologue to Winsor McCay's pioneering animated film, Gertie the Dinosaur (1914). [JC]
Horton, Forest W, Jr
(? - ) US author of a Technothriller, The Technocrats (1980), revolving around a super-Computer in the wrong hands, and the justified Paranoia this causes when it turns out that the computer is running America via a proxy Android president. [JC]
Out of This World [magazine]
UK Digest-format magazine published by John Spencer and Co; edited by Samuel Assael and Maurice Nahum. Billed as "bi-monthly" but two issues only, October 1954 and January 1955. / This short-lived weird-fiction venture from the Badger Books stable is principally notable for the fact that the entire contents of both issues – each comprising five novelettes – were written by John S Glasby under his pseudonyms Max Chartair, Randall Conway, Ray Cosmic, Michael Hamilton and A J Merak ...
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 ...