SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 14 March 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 9 March 2026
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I Was a Teenage Frankenstein
US film (1957). Santa Rosa Productions, American International Pictures. Executive producers Samuel Z Arkoff, James H Nicholson. Directed by Herbert L Strock. Written by Herman Cohen, Aben Kandel. Cast includes Whit Bissell, Robert Burton, Phyllis Coates and Gary Conway. 74 minutes, cut to 72 minutes. Black and white, with colour finale. / Professor Frankenstein (Bissell), seemingly an ordinary college professor in an unnamed US ...
Patrick, Cat
(? - ) US author whose novels use sf topoi, some of them Clichés, to activate romance plots for Young Adult readers: in Forgotten (2011) it is a daily Memory Edit which imposes an effect state of Amnesia on its young protagonist; in Revived (2012) an experimental Drug ...
Naam, Ramez
(? - ) Egyptian-born computer scientist, entrepreneur and author, in the USA from infancy. Much of his work has been in the application of Information Theory in the development of Communication technologies, a focus which informs his Nexus 5 sequence comprising Nexus (2012), Crux (2013) and Apex (2015). Nexus itself is a dangerously ...
Sobel, Robert
(1931-1999) US academic and author, almost exclusively of nonfiction studies in business history. His only sf novel, For Want of a Nail: If Burgoyne Had Won at Saratoga (1973), is an Alternate History of post-Revolution America, written in the form of a textbook, with maps and hundreds of footnotes to imaginary sources. The Jonbar Point of the book is the victory of General Burgoyne at Sarasota in October 1777, ...
Rees, Arthur J
(1872-1942) Australia author, later in the UK, whose first sf novel, The Shrieking Pit: Being the Mystery of the Golden Anchor Inn (1919), is a World War One thriller in which an Invention threatens to change the course of events. In his second, The Threshold of Fear: A Sober Fantasy (1925), which is told within a Club Story frame, a young man discovers an Asian ...
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 ...