SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 1 April 2023
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 29 March 2023
Sponsor of the day: Ansible Editions
Thomas, D M
(1935-2023) UK poet and author who made use of sf themes most explicitly in such early Poetry as "The Head-Rape" in New Worlds for March 1968 and the two-part "Computer 70: Dreams & Lovepoems" (March-April 1970 New Worlds), a sequence assembled with other poetry of interest in Logan Stone (coll 1970); or the later "S. F." (in The Umbral Anthology of Science Fiction Poetry, anth ...
Martin, Ian Kennedy
(1936- ) UK scriptwriter for Television and author, best known for a police procedural series, The Sweeney (1975-1978); brother of Troy Kennedy Martin. What has become his Acteon sequence may have been initiated without a sequel in mind, by The Last Crime (1980) as by John Domatilla, set in a harsh, twenty-first century, Dystopian ...
Stong, Phil
(1899-1957) US author and editor, author of the thrice-filmed State Fair (1932). His The Other Worlds (anth 1941; vt The Other Worlds: Twenty-five Modern Stories of Mystery and Imagination 1942) was the first important sf Anthology. Its twenty-five stories, about half sf and half horror, were mostly from the Pulp magazines, not previously regarded as a proper source of material (of sf at least) ...
Explorers
Film (1985). Edward S Feldman/Paramount. Directed by Joe Dante. Written by Eric Luke. Cast includes Ethan Hawke, River Phoenix and Jason Presson. 109 minutes. Colour. / Three schoolboys (Hawke, Phoenix, Presson), tipped off by a dream, employ a Computer to help create a sphere that can move very quickly and is impervious to Gravity; they use it to power a ...
Ni Kuang
Main writing name of Ni Cong (1935-2022), a Chinese author whose life began unpromisingly as a teenage drop-out, before his swift rise through the ranks of the Communist Party security police. Accused of counter-revolutionary activities, he fled to Hong Kong in 1957 and embraced anti-Communist fiction with all the zeal of a convert. His first professional sale, the non-genre Huomai ["Buried Alive"] (December 1957 Keung Sheung Daily News) was a grotesque ...
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 ...