SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 13 May 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 12 May 2025
Sponsor of the day: Ted Chiang
Fabian, Stephen E
(1930-2025) American artist, sometimes credited as Steve Fabian or simply Fabian. The self-trained Fabian first worked as an electronic engineer, but he began contributing art to Fanzines in the late 1960s and became a full-time professional artist in 1973. He did a number of covers and interior art for SF Magazines, mostly Amazing, Fantastic, and ...
Monster Magnet
American rock band formed in New Jersey in 1989. There have been several line-up changes: the original members were Dave Wyndorf, Tim Cronin and John McBain; by 1993 only Wyndorf, the main creative force and songwriter, remained. The group's sound is stoner rock, being musically influenced by such early 1970s bands as Black Sabbath and Hawkwind. / Marvel Comics are a clear inspiration (one track is named "Ego the Living ...
Sorokin, Vladimir
(1955- ) Russian artist, playwright and author, active since about 1972, though his first work to appear in English was Ochered' (1983; trans Sally Laird as The Queue 1988), a deadpan Satire on Soviet Russia; the text of this story, which is set in a gigantic unending queue, consists of nothing but lines of dialogue exchanged amongst dozens, maybe hundreds, of unidentified speakers, and so is even more stripped down ...
Besher, Alexander
(1951-2020) China-born, Japanese-raised US author, editor and journalist who published a posthumous edition of David Lindsay's tales as The Violet Apple & The Witch (1976) in his Chicago Review Press, and who began to publish sf in English (some stories had appeared in Japanese) with his Rim cycle, comprising Rim: A Novel of Virtual Reality (1994), Mir: A Novel of Virtual Reality (1998) and Chi ...
Robinson, Frank M
(1926-2014) US editor and author, who began his career as an office boy with Ziff-Davis in the 1940s, where he first met his long-time colleague William Hamling; he began to publish work of genre interest with "The Maze" in Astounding for June 1950 and was for a time fairly prolific. At the end of this early period he released his first (and for decades his only) solo novel, The Power ...
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 ...