SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 11 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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Harrison, Helga
(1923- ) UK author whose sf novel, The Catacombs (1962), depicts with some irony a Ruined Earth Britain, long after a nuclear World War Three, in which "Crishuns", having persuaded themselves that they warrant special attention, await salvation, while dodging the oppressive Communes, which are governed by a garrulously domineering dictator. [JC]
Johnson, George Clayton
(1929-2015) US screenwriter and author who began writing work of genre interest with "All of Us Are Dying" in the Slick magazine Rogue for October 1961, and who concentrated for most of his career on fantasy and horror work, some of it assembled in All of Us Are Dying and Other Stories (coll 1999). Scripts and Stories Written for The Twilight Zone (coll 1977; vt Twilight Zone Scripts and Stories 1996) and ...
Esper
In now somewhat obsolete sf Terminology, a person who is able to use one or more of the powers of ESP, as in E E Smith's "Storm Cloud on Deka" (June 1942 Astonishing) – perhaps its earliest sf appearance. This is usually regarded as including such "passive" powers as Telepathy (mind-reading) and perhaps ...
Verhoeven, Paul
(1938- ) Dutch filmmaker whose long career began in 1960 when he was still a student in Leiden, where he studied to Master's level in mathematics and physics. He refined his craft through the sixties, particularly in a documentary produced during his national service and on the iconic Dutch television series Floris (1968), where he made a star of the young Rutger Hauer. In the seventies he emerged as a major, if notorious, director of provocative ...
Blue Book Magazine, The
US general fiction Pulp magazine which ran for 613 monthly issues from May 1905 to May 1956. It began as The Monthly Story Magazine, became The Monthly Story Blue Book Magazine in September 1906, The Blue Book Magazine in May 1907, and finally Bluebook in February 1952. By the 1930s it was regarded as the "King of the Pulps" and one of the big three, alongside Argosy and ...
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 ...