SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 18 April 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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Doctor X
Film (1932). First National/Warner Bros. Directed by Michael Curtiz (1888-1962). Written by Robert Tasker, Earl Baldwin, based on a play by Howard W Comstock and Allen C Miller. Cast includes Lionel Atwill, Preston Foster, Lee Tracy and Fay Wray. 77 minutes. Original prints two-strip Technicolor; later black and white. / A series of cannibalistic murders committed when the Moon is full is investigated by reporter Lee Taylor (Tracy) and medical expert Dr ...
O'Keefe, Claudia
(1958- ) US author, the hero of whose first sf novel, Black Snow Days (1990), has been Genetically Engineered by his mother to reawaken, ten years after his fatal car crash, into a Post-Holocaust environment he is intended to redeem; the novel rather confusedly puts him through a long quest sequence for a McGuffin Hidden Base which contains the answers to ...
Bishop, Michael
(1945-2023) US author, much travelled in childhood, with an MA in English from the University of Georgia, where he did a thesis on the poetry of Dylan Thomas. He began publishing sf with "Piñon Fall" in Galaxy for October 1970, and in a short period established himself as one of the significant new writers of the 1970s. Though his early stories and novels display considerable intellectual complexity, and do not shirk the downbeat implications of their ...
Flatland
The two-Dimensional realm first depicted by Edwin A Abbott in Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884; rev 1884), initially as by A Square. Flatland has provoked a number of more or less didactic Sequels by Other Hands which build in various ways on Abbott's neat analogy for imagining a hypothetical fourth spatial Dimension in ...
Chetwode, R D
(? -? ) UK author, probably pseudonymous, active during the 1890s. The Marble City: Being the Strange Adventures of Three Boys (1895) features a South Pacific Island Lost World whose Aryan-Lemurian inhabitants boast high attainments. Nevertheless the three heroes marooned there soon make their escape, enriched. [JC]
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 ...