SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 9 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.
Site updated on 7 July 2025
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Kilian, Crawford
(1941- ) US-born teacher and author, in Canada from 1967 and a Canadian citizen from 1973 who began publishing work of genre interest with a fantasy for younger children, Wonders, Inc. (1968 chap). He began to publish sf with the first volume of his complex Chronoplane Wars sequence, The Empire of Time (1978), which continued after a gap of years with The Fall of the Republic (1987) and ...
Last Man
For the past two centuries and more, the vast majority stories featuring human beings to whom the term "last man" can be applied are in fact men; several early tales and novels incorporate that circumstance into their titles (see examples immediately below), and in not a few of these tales a "last woman" is met, in time for the race to continue. For these historical reasons, this entry has not been renamed Last Human. The notion of the Last Man left alive on Earth (see ...
Glass, Philip
(1937- ) US avant-garde classical composer; Glass has been a prolific, influential and varied maker of music since the 1960s, working in minimalist and popular idioms, utilizing both electronic and more conventional orchestral media. His most distinctive works share a focus on multiply-repeated rhythmic and melodic loops, to often incantatory though always precise and solid effect. The climax of his plotless but widely noted first opera, Einstein on the Beach ...
Norway
Norway, along with the other Scandinavian countries, has always been somewhat isolated from the main roads of European cultural development, and never more so than during the eighteenth century, when the Age of Enlightenment swept across the rest of Europe. Outside the mainly French-speaking courts, Scandinavia was poor and starving, mainly agricultural, and crushed by repeated, ruinous wars. It is perhaps not surprising that excursions into fantastic literature were few: Scandinavia had ...
Gilmore, Anthony
Collaborative pseudonym used in Astounding Stories of Super-Science by Harry Bates and Desmond W Hall, respectively editor and assistant editor of that magazine, for the enthusiastically received Hawk Carse series, put into book form as Space Hawk: The Greatest of Interplanetary Adventures (November 1931-November 1932 Astounding and July 1942 Amazing; coll ...
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 ...