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Wednesday 18 June 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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Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Space Adventures (Classics)
US magazine, one of the reprint Digest-size magazines published by Sol Cohen's Ultimate Publishing Company. Six issues, Winter 1970 to Summer 1971. / The title was shortened to Space Adventures after the first two issues. The numbering ran, strangely, #9-#14, picking up where Science Fiction Classics left off, and Space Adventures (Classics) would be regarded as simply a ...
Flood, Leslie
(1921-2007) UK sf book dealer, reviewer and literary agent who was one of the co-founders of the International Fantasy Award and (as Secretary) reported this award's progress in several New Worlds articles beginning with "A Merit for Fantasy" (May 1952). He was assistant editor for Science Fantasy #7 (1954). The first of his lucid sf book reviews, signed "L Flood", ...
Supervillains
Supervillains (see Villains) were an inevitable consequence of the emergence of Superheroes in Comics and other media, since it quickly became apparent that the pioneering superhero Superman (see DC Comics) and his similarly powerful counterparts could as a rule encounter no meaningful opposition from ordinary criminals to create ...
Miyazawa Kenji
(1896-1933) Japanese poet and author, overlooked in his lifetime but posthumously emblematic of Fantastika in Japan's long 1920s, and cherished as a pacifist, internationalist thinker of the pre-war period. Graduating from Morioka Agriculture and Forestry College in 1918, Miyazawa was an early supporter of organic foods and fertilizers, a strict vegetarian, and after 1926 an ardent proponent of Esperanto, into which he translated some of ...
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 ...