SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 10 July 2025
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.
Site updated on 7 July 2025
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Richards, Lysander Salmon
(1835-1926) US author of Breaking Up; Or, the Birth, Development, and Death of the Earth and its Satellite in Story (1896), a title evoking the cosmological perspectives of an author like the then popular Camille Flammarion, and the epic history being unpacked is intermittently "narratized", to give sentient interest, the viewpoint character being a dead but observant Alien from another star who tracks the ...
Hardisty, Paul E
(? - ) Canadian engineer, environmental scientist and author, in Australia for some years; perhaps best-known for the Claymore Straker sequence of detections, beginning with The Abrupt Physics of Dying (2014), whose focus on Ecological crises brings the series close to the fantastic [the series is listed below for convenience]. Hardisty is of direct sf interest for The Forcing sequence beginning with ...
Sohl, Jerry
Working name of US author and former journalist Gerald Allan Sohl Sr (1913-2002), active from about 1950 in sf and other genres as Sohl and under various pseudonyms, including Nathan Butler and Sean Mei Sullivan. He began publishing sf with The 7th Order (March 1952 Galaxy; 2010 ebook) and soon released The Haploids (1952), the first of several 1950s novels whose slick surface and sharp economy of scale marked him as a professional ...
Babits, Mihály
(1883-1941) Hungarian editor, translator (from English and German) and author, best known for his poetry, the finest example of which is probably the autobiographical Jönas konyve ["The Book of Jonah"] (1938). His sf novel, A Gólyakalifa ["The Caliph's Stork"] (1918; trans anon as The Nightmare 1966), is of interest in its depiction of a split personality. A utopian novel, ...
Futurian, The
UK Fanzine (1938-1940), edited from Leeds, Yorkshire, by J Michael Rosenblum as "A Green Jester Publication". Eight typeset issues on an approximately quarterly schedule from June 1938 to Spring 1940. / A continuation of the Leeds Science Fiction League's Bulletin (2 issues, January and March 1938), The Futurian was a small printed publication featuring fiction, ...
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 ...