SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 22 April 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 21 April 2025
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Broderick, Damien
(1944-2025) Australian author, editor and critic; he had a PhD in the semiotics of fiction, science and sf with special reference to the work of Samuel R Delany. He edited four anthologies of Australian sf: The Zeitgeist Machine (anth 1977), Strange Attractors (anth 1985), Matilda at the Speed of Light (anth 1988) and Centaurus: The Best of Australian Science Fiction (anth ...
Rich, Simon
(1984- ) US scriptwriter, journalist and author, first known for his work for the Television series Saturday Night Live beginning in 2007. His short stories and sketches, several of which have appeared in the Shouts and Murmurs section of the New Yorker, intensify an initially slick shaggy-dog literalism into an intense, almost elegiac, "wacky" absurdism (see Absurdist SF), his first ...
Rafcam, Nal
(? - ) Undoubtedly pseudonymous author – backwards this name reads MacFarlan – of the imaginatively unremarkable sf novel The Troglodytes, or Dwellers of the Deep (1961; vt The Troglodytes 1962). The eponymous Lost Race of Aliens is discovered under Antarctica as they come to the surface in a misguided attempt to stop nuclear testing (see ...
Barry, Iris
(1895-1969) UK-born critic, film curator, poet and author, in US from 1930; she lived with Wyndham Lewis for several years from around the end of World War One until 1922, having two children with him. She was primarily a writer on film – D W Griffith: American Film Master (1940 chap) was published by the Museum of Modern Art in New York – and as the founder in 1935 and curator until her 1950 retirement of the MOMA Film Library was a ...
Stockton, Frank R
(1834-1902) US editor and author, whose known pseudonyms for early work included Paul Fort and John Lewees. He worked on Scribner's Magazine before becoming assistant editor of St Nicholas Magazine 1873-1881, and began to publish stories for children with "The Slight Mistake" for the American Courier in 1855, though his first tale to gain much attention was "Ting-a-ling" (1867 Riverside Magazine for Young People); it was assembled, ...
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 ...