SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 10 April 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.
Site updated on 6 April 2026
Sponsor of the day: David Cowhig
Space Sweepers
South Korean film (2021; original title Seungriho). Merry Christmas and Netflix presents a Bidangil Pictures and Dexter Studios production. Directed by Jo Sung-hee. Written by Jo Sung-hee with Yoo-kang Seo-ae and Yoon Seung-min. Cast includes Richard Armitage, Jin Seon-kyu, Kim Mu-yeol, Kim Tae-ri, Park Ye-rin, Song Joong-ki and Yoo Hae-jin. 136 minutes. Colour. / The crew of the Spaceship Victory saves a ...
SF Magazines
Sf stories were a popular and prominent feature of such general-fiction Pulp magazines as The Argosy and The All-Story during the first quarter of the twentieth century. They were not, however, known as sf: if there were any need to differentiate them, the terms Scientific Romance or "different stories" might be used, but until the appearance of a ...
Athey, Henry
(? -? ) US author of an sf novel, With Gyves of Gold: A Novel (1898) with A Herbert Bowers, both writers remaining untraced, though both may have been based in Missouri. A young man, experimented upon by a modestly Mad Scientist, develops the paranormal ability to travel by astral means to another planet, where he observes the operation of a Utopia ...
Williamson, Michael Z
(1967- ) UK-born soldier (now retired) and author, in Canada then USA from early adulthood, whose first novel, Freehold (2004), initiated the Grainne War sequence which was eventually joined by the Ripple Creek sequence beginning with Better To Beg Forgiveness ... (2007), both series and some shorter works eventually slotted into the Freehold Universe over-series. Williamson adhered subsequently in much of his work to the ...
Birdsong, Keith
(1959-2019) American artist of Native American (Muscogee Creek-Cherokee) descent who entered the field of sf Illustration in the late 1980s after serving in the United States Army and working as a journalist. After initially doing covers for juvenile sf novels published by Ballantine Books, he came to specialize in painting covers for numerous Star Trek novels, with occasional covers for other ...
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 ...