SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 13 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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Corston, George
(1932- ) UK author of Aftermath (1968), an exceedingly grim vision of England after a nuclear Disaster that has driven what remains of the land into martial law and useless defiance of the inevitable; the protagonist, cursing his fate, dies of leukaemia. It is the case that, as with this title, surprisingly unconventional tales sometimes slipped into the Robert Hale Limited list, which ...
O'Neil, Dennis
(1939-2020) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "The Iconoclasts" in Fantastic for April 1971, and who has since published some short fiction; his first novel, The Bite of Monsters (1971), an sf tale involving an Alien occupation of Earth, which is successfully resisted. O'Neil's main focus for most of his career comprised tales and Graphic Novels ...
Crackle of Death
Made-for-tv film (1976). Francy Productions for Universal Television. Produced by Cy Chermak. Directed by Alex Grasshoff and Don Weiss. Written by Arthur Rowe and Rudolph Borchert from an idea by Rowe ("The Energy Eater"); Bill S Ballinger ("Firefall"). Cast includes Fred Bier, Philip Carey, Elaine Giftos, Jack Grinnage, Darren McGavin, Simon Oakland, William Smith, Michael Strong and Robert Yuro. 92 minutes. Colour. / This film actually ...
Mysterious Island, The
US film (1929). Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Directed by Benjamin Christensen, Lucien Hubbard and Maurice Tourneur; underwater sequences directed by J Ernest Williamson. Written by Lucien Hubbard, loosely based on the works of Jules Verne. Cast includes Lionel Barrymore, Jacqueline Gadsden, Lloyd Hughes and Montagu Love. 95 minutes. Originally predominantly two-colour Technicolor, but apparently only black and white copies survive [see American Film Institute ...
Romanov, German
(1964- ) Russian author of copious Alternate History and Military SF novels, a vocation to which he turned after a career in actual history, having earned his PhD for a dissertation on the Cossack population of his native Eastern Siberia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Retiring as an assistant professor, he returned to what had formerly been his ...
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 ...