SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 11 April 2026
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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Blue Beetle
US Comic (1940-1950). Fox Publications, Inc. 40 issues (numbered #1-#11, #31-#42, #44-#60; see below regarding #12-#30). Artists include Alvin Hollingsworth, Jack Kamen, EC Stoner and Al Zere. Scriptwriters include Will Eisner, Alvin Hollingsworth, E C Stoner and Al Zere. Initially 68 pages with 9 long strips, it had reduced to 36 pages and 3 long strips by the end of its run; there would also be a short text story, plus short ...
Shearman, Robert
(1970- ) UK playwright, scriptwriter and author, most of whose fiction has been fantasy, sometimes with an Horror in SF coloration; Zombies have for instance appeared in such tales as Granny's Grinning (in The Dead That Walk, anth 2009; 2015 ebook). His numerous plays, beginning in the early 1990s but none seemingly published, are adventurous, innovative, show the influence of his ...
Memoirs of an Invisible Man
Film (1992). Warner Bros. Directed by John Carpenter. Written by Robert Collector, Dana Olson, William Goldman, based on Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1987) by H F Saint. Cast includes Chevy Chase, Daryl Hannah, Michael McKean, Sam Neill and Stephen Tobolowsky. 99 minutes. Colour. / Nick Halloway (Chase), a feckless businessman, is turned invisible by an industrial accident (see ...
Psychotronic Video
US letter-size saddle-stapled Cinema magazine printed on newsprint. Publisher and Editor Michael J Weldon. 41 issues from 1989 to 2006; quarterly publication schedule. / Following his early-1980s Fanzine entitled Psychotronic TV, publisher Weldon revived the publication in 1989 as a Semiprozine, gaining significant bookshop distribution. The focus was on films and, though to a lesser degree, ...
Kadohata, Cynthia
(1956- ) US author who has focused primarily on Young Adult fiction, most of it nonfantastic. Of sf interest is In the Heart of the Valley of Love (1992), set in a Near Future Los Angeles, which has by 2052 become an impoverished, ill-governed, hardscrabble. Dystopian enclave. The protagonist, unusually for an sf novel set in ...
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 ...