SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 10 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: The Telluride Institute
Push
Film (2009). Summit Entertainment in association with Icon Productions presents an Infinity Features Entertainment production. Directed by Paul McGuigan. Written by David Bourla. Cast includes Camilla Belle, Chris Evans, Dakota Fanning, Joel Gretsch and Djimon Hounsou. 111 minutes. Colour. / A motley group of fugitive psychics in Hong Kong devise an elaborate plan to bring down the US covert operations division which has been forcibly harnessing the mutants' ...
Calvert, Robert
(1945-1988) South African-born poet and musician who moved to London in the 1960s and became friendly with Michael Moorcock, amongst others. He fronted Hawkwind during their most spacy 1970s period, but also released material under his own name, although his solo album Captain Lockheed & The Starfighters (1974) is not sf (it is a concept-album that retells the story of the development of Lockheed's F-104 ...
Filk
One of the more enduring coinages of Fan Language, this is the short form of "filksong", which in turn originated from the obvious typo in an early-1950s Fanzine article, "The Influence of Science Fiction on Modern American Filk Music" by Lee Jacobs (intended for the APA SAPS, the Spectator Amateur Press Society, but not actually published there owing to bawdy content). The first ...
Emmerson, Steve
(? - ) UK author of two Doctor Who Ties: Casualties of War (2000), set at the end of World War One as (or so it seems) the dead are rising; and Dark Progeny (2001), in which an arrogant Terraforming of the planet Ceres Alpha backfires. [JC]
Pohlman, Edward
(1933- ) Indian-born author, in the USA from an early age, whose sf novel, The God of Planet 607 (1972), attempts with moderate success to fuse Religion and Space Opera. [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 ...