SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 29 September 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 25 September 2023
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Cawthorn, James
(1929-2008) UK illustrator, critic and author; he often used the working name Jim Cawthorn, though he also went by J Cawthorn or simply Cawthorn, and his name was sometimes rendered as Cawthorne. After he entered sf around 1954, his career was largely defined by his relationship with Michael Moorcock – the men quickly bonded due to their shared interest in Edgar Rice Burroughs – and they first worked ...
Lively, Adam
(1961- ) UK author, son of Penelope Lively (1931- ) [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below], in whose first novel, Blue Fruit (1988), an eighteenth-century traveller in the Far East takes ship back to an Alternate World version of twentieth-century America, though the new world makes little impression on him (see ...
Hayward, William Stephens
(1835-1870) UK author, responsible for many adventure novels published in book form between 1863 and 1886, whose sf novel, The Cloud King, or Up in the Air and Down in the Sea (February-August 1863 The Boys' Journal as "The Cloud King; or, The Adventures of Charley Skyflier"; 1865), features a Balloon trip to an African Lost World in which low Gravity seems to help keep the natives ...
Budrys, Algis
Working name of Prussian-born American author and editor Algirdas Jonas Budrys (1931-2008). He was born in East Prussia (now Russia); when his parents were exiled, he was taken with them to the US in 1936, where he remained. This experience of dislodgement and exile clearly shaped much of his fiction. He began publishing sf in 1952 with two more or less simultaneous releases, "The High Purpose" (November 1952 Astounding) and "Walk to the World" (November 1952 ...
Houston, David
Pseudonym of US author Houston Force Lumpkin III (1938- ), who produced sf books with some intensity for a few years, though he fell silent after 1982. Generally unremarkable, though competent, his works began with Alien Perspective (1978) and the Gods in a Vortex sf-adventure sequence comprising Gods in a Vortex (1979) and Wingmaster (1981). He then wrote a series of novels Tied to 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 ...