SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 29 May 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 29 May 2023
Sponsor of the day: Joe Haldeman
Porcupine Tree
UK progressive rock band, founded by Steven Wilson (1967- ), relatively little-known but prolific and deftly creative of a series of attractive and musically complex sonic structures, often sf or Fantasy in styling. "Jupiter Islands" (on On The Sunday of Life, 1991) describes a gauchely "Dancers at the End of Time" cosmos ("Magenta forests on a crimson sea ... Scarlet moons in a domino sky"); although "Space Transmission" and ...
Ludgate Monthly, The
UK general-interest magazine which ran for 118 issues from May 1891 to February 1901 when it merged with The Universal Magazine. It went through a succession of publishers and editors, none of whom seemed to know what to do with it, though it was at its best when it became a companion to Black and White from November 1895 to March 1898 and was edited by James Nicol Dunn and then Henry D Lowry. Its first editor was Philip May, not the same as the noted artist and cartoonist Phil ...
Vision of Tomorrow
Australian/UK magazine, monthly, A4-size, twelve issues, August 1969 to September 1970, published by Ronald E Graham (1908-1979), an Australian businessman and sf enthusiast; edited by Philip Harbottle from the UK. The magazine was printed on good quality coated paper stock, but to call it a Slick magazine would be stretching the definition. Nevertheless the production and presentation, carried out almost single-handedly by ...
Rockwood, Roy
A House Name used on Juvenile Series published by several firms, including Cupples & Leon, The Mershon Company and George Sully, but all titles from 1906 onwards were generated by The Stratemeyer Syndicate; Edward Stratemeyer, as usual, provided outlines for his authors to work from, and probably wrote at least two of the early titles himself. The first Roy Rockwood series was the ...
White, Andrew Joseph
(? - ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Chokechain" in Transcendent 4: The Year's Best Transgender Speculative Fiction (anth 2019) edited by Bogi Takács. His first novel, the Young Adult Hell Followed with Us (2022), deftly conjoins a plot structure from the SF Megatext with a narrative dealing with complex gender issues (see ...
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 ...