SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 9 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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Worlds of Ultima
Videogame series (from 1990). Origin Systems (OS). / The Worlds of Ultima series was launched as a spinoff from the Ultima sequence of Sword and Sorcery Computer Role Playing Games. The central conceit of Ultima is that the player is represented by the Avatar, an individual from our own world who enters the fantasy land of Britannia through a ...
Panic in Year Zero!
Film (1962; vt End of the World). Alta Vista, American International Pictures. Directed by Ray Milland. Written by Jay Simms, John Morton, story by Simms, based (without credit) on the stories "Lot" (May 1953 F&SF; vt "Panic in Year Zero" in Space Movies: Classic Science Fiction Films, anth 1995, ed Peter Haining) and "Lot's Daughter" (October 1954 ...
Black, Ladbroke
(1877-1940) UK author of much boys' fiction, often as Lionel Day or Ladbroke Lionel Day Black or Paul Urquhart, and thrillers, including some Sexton Blake Library novels, including The Strange Affair of the Rejuvenation Club (1928 chap) as Anonymous, in which the sf element turns out to be a criminous hoax; he also wrote occasionally as Ladbroke Lionel Day Black. He had begun publishing as early as 1902, though he put nothing of sf interest ...
Llewellyn, Robert
(1956- ) UK actor, comedian and author, perhaps best known for his role from 1989 to 2012 as the Android Kryten in the Television series Red Dwarf, for which he also wrote some scripts. He first came to notice within an sf context, however, with his play "Mammon, Robot Born of Woman" (performed Summer 1988, Edinburgh Festival), about a Robot whose ...
Heath, Peter
Working name of US author Peter Heath Fine (1938-1995), whose novels Assassins from Tomorrow (1967) – which suggests that John F Kennedy (see Icons) was assassinated by killers from the future – The Mind Brothers (1967) and Men Who Die Twice (1968) comprise the thriller-like Mind Brothers sf series, which combines a great deal of fairly convoluted action with Time Travel. The ...
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 ...