SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 16 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.
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van den Berg, Laura
(1981- ) US author some of whose fiction, assembled in What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves US (coll 2009) and The Isle of Youth (coll 2013), has fantastic content. She is of specific sf interest for her first novel, Find Me (2015), set in a Near Future America grappling ineffectively with the first genuinely transformative effects of ...
Waltermire, Beecher W
(1858-1932) US lawyer and author, father of the weird fiction author Arthur B Waltermire (1888-1938); he is of some sf interest for The Adventure of a Skeleton: A Tale of Natural Gas (1890), whose abnormally thin protagonist manages to slip down an oil well into the Hollow Earth, where he finds a fantasy-tinged world, and has adventures there. [JC]
Rainbolt, Dusty
(? - ) US author who specializes in nonfiction about Cats; her sf novel, All the Marbles (2003), features a Cat as deuteragonist (it is seemingly not a super-cat) in a Space Opera careening, in self-consciously Screwball Comedy fashion, after a McGuffin. Death Under the Crescent Moon (2013) is fantasy. [JC]
McElroy, John
(1846-1929) US printer, publisher, journalist and author most famous for the nonfiction Andersonville: A Story of Rebel Military Prisons: Fifteen Months a Guest of the So-called Southern Confederacy: A Private Soldier's Experience in Richmond, Andersonville, Savannah, Millen, Blackshear, and Florence (1879), an extremely influential first-person account. Of sf interest is ...
1990
UK tv serial (1977-1978). BBC TV. Produced by Prudence Fitzgerald. Regular cast included Edward Woodward, Barbara Kellerman, Robert Lang, Tony Doyle, Lisa Harrow. Most episodes written Wilfred Greatorex, who devised the series, or Edmund Ward. 16 55-minute episodes. Colour. / Reflecting the fears of the middle classes in the 1970s, this serial, set in a socialist UK of 1990, warns of what could happen if the welfare state continued in its ...
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 ...