SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 9 June 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 8 June 2026
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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Chauvin, Cy
(1952- ) US fan and critic, active in Detroit fandom from the 1970s, publishing there an intermittent Fanzine, Seldon's Plan (1969-1985); he became active as a reviewer and commentator at about the same time. Chauvin is of general interest for the relatively early A Multitude of Visions (anth 1975 chap), an anthology of criticism whose contents have been sagaciously reprinted from Fanzines, where ...
Thompson, Alice
(? - ) Scottish musician and author who first became known as a founding member of the rock band The Woodentops in 1983, leaving in the 1987. She has been active as a writer from around 1990, most of her fiction consisting of Gothic explorations of extreme states, as in her first novel Justine (1990) which intricately replays, while reversing in Feminist terms, the implications of ...
Pratt, Cornelia Atwood
Working and maiden name of Cornelia Atwood Comer (1865-1929), author with Richard Slee (who has not been traced) of Dr Berkeley's Discovery (1899), in which the titular pathologist solves a mystery with his memory-cell-reading device (see Psychology). In an early variation on the Urban Legend that a dead person's retinas retain the last image seen, this Invention recovers latent visual ...
Hamlin, V T
(1900-1993) US Comics writer and artist who created the Alley Oop (which see) comic strip in 1932, initially as Prehistoric SF but later ranging much more widely via Time Travel, beginning with Alley Oop: The First Time Travel Adventure (6 March 1939-23 March 1940 Alley Oop; graph 2013); there is even a trip to the Moon in ...
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 ...