SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 24 June 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.
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Bilal, Enki
Working name of Yugoslavian-born Comics illustrator, film director and author Enes Bilalović (1951- ), in France from 1960; a very distinctive, innovative and original creator of sensuous, decadent futures. He attended the Académie des Beaux Arts briefly in the early 1970s. In 1971 he won a competition to create an sf Comic-strip story run by the magazine Pilote, in which he subsequently published ...
Ralli, Constantine
(1854-1934) UK author, who changed his name to Constantine Scaramanga-Ralli by Royal Licence in 1910, after publishing his only sf novel, Vanessa: A Romance of the New Century and the New World (1904), which is set in a Near Future New York controlled by a tiny oligarchy; the masses soon revolt. [JC]
Berry, John D
(1950- ) American fan, author, typographer and graphic designer, longtime partner of author Eileen Gunn; he primarily works as an editor, book designer, design writer, and type consultant for software companies, including in the past Microsoft. Almost all of Berry's sf-related writings have appeared in Fanzines, although he published one short story in Jessica Amanda Salmonson's anthology ...
Big Meat Eater
Film (1982). BCD Entertainment. Director Chris Windsor. Written by Windsor, Laurence Keane. Cast includes George Dawson, Andrew Gillies, Big Miller and Howard Taylor. 82 minutes. Colour. / This Canadian musical pastiche of sf and horror films – a sort of designer midnight movie about an Invasion by two Aliens of a small town in the 1950s – waves its low budget like a flag and, despite incoherences, is cheerfully ...
Thomas, Lex
Joint pseudonym of US authors Lex Hrabe (? - ), who is also an actor, and Thomas Voorhies (? - ), who is also a painter, a profession that predates his writing work. Their Young Adult Quarantine sequence beginning with Quarantine: The Loners (2012) depicts – with considerable violence – existence in a high school after a virus, which kills adults but ...
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 ...