SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 14 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 ...
Dollens, Morris Scott
(1920-1994) US artist – also as Morris Dollens, Maurice S Dollens and M S Dollens – who produced early work for Fanzines and began professional SF Magazine appearances in the late 1950s with one-off covers for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (November 1957), Venture Science Fiction (May 1958) and Fantastic ...
Cline, Ernest
(1972- ) US screenwriter and author whose Ready Player sequence, beginning with Ready Player One (2011), is set in a Near Future 2044 where Climate Change and other degradations have made the external world profoundly unpleasant. In this context, the creation of a total-immersion Cyberspace-styled Virtual Reality ...
Link Click
Chinese animated tv series (2021). Original title Shíguāng Dàilǐrén ["Time Agents"]. Bilibili. Directed by Li Haoling. Writer(s) not traced. Voice cast includes Su Shangqing, Tútè Hāméng, Sūn Lùlù, Li Shimeng, Yang Tianxiang and Zhào Yìtóng. Eleven circa 22-minute episodes, plus two specials and ten chibi shorts. Colour. / Two young men, Cheng ...
Matter Transmission
The matter transmitter is one of sf's many facilitating devices for Transportation: a hypothetical machine which is not rationally plausible in terms of known science (at least at any macroscopic scale) but which is very convenient for certain narrative purposes (see Imaginary Science). By virtue of an obvious play on words, matter transmitters were sometimes called "transmats" – as in Lan ...
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 ...