SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 8 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
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Finney, Charles G
(1905-1984) US newspaperman and author – named after but apparently not related to the famous revivalist minister, Charles Grandison Finney (1792-1875) – who spent the years 1927-1929 with the US infantry in Tientsin, China; an oriental influence pervades most of his work. His novels and stories, though Fantasy rather than sf, have been influential throughout the field, especially his famous The Circus of Dr Lao (1935), filmed less than ...
Poisons
Assorted deadly substances form a subset of sf Drugs but often contain little intrinsic science-fictional interest: for example, "barbitide" in Samuel R Delany's Captives of the Flame (1963 dos; rev vt Out of the Dead City 1968) has effects resembling those of conventional arsenic, while the fast-acting "Divban rabbit-venom" mentioned in Roger Zelazny's ...
Gevers, Nick
(1965- ) UK-born sf editor and critic, in South Africa from 1970, who has written for various journals including Interzone, Locus – where he had regular review columns 2001-2008 – The New York Review of Science Fiction and SF Site. He has been an editor for the Yorkshire-based ...
Cybernetics
In sf Terminology this is a word so often misused that its real meaning is in danger of being devalued or forgotten. / The term "cybernetics", derived from a Greek word meaning helmsman or controller, was coined by the distinguished mathematician Norbert Wiener in 1947 to describe a new science on which he and others had been working since 1942. The word first passed into general usage with the publication of his ...
Klaabu kosmoses
Estonian/Russian animated film (1981; vt Klaabu in Space). Tallinnfilm. Directed by Avo Paistik. Written by Avo Paistik and Enn Vetemaa. 15 minutes. Colour. / Klaabu kosmoses is the third part of a trilogy of dialogue-free shorts by Paistik. The first is Klaabu (1978; 10 minutes), where an egg is formed from a drop of water and is brooded by a passing bird: it hatches into Klaabu, a four-limbed egg with a face (and, judging from ...
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 ...