SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 5 September 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.
Site updated on 31 August 2026
Sponsor of the day: Paul Giamatti
Murray, Will
Working name of US author William Patrick Murray (1953-2026), who showed an interest throughout his career in Superheroes of the Pulp tradition (on which he was a known authority) such as Doc Savage, about which figure he wrote the nonfiction Secrets of Doc Savage (1981 chap). In this context he had been literary agent for Lester Dent's estate since 1979. ...
Baxter, John
(1939- ) Australian author, who has also lived and worked in the UK and USA. He began publishing sf with "Vendetta's End" in Science Fiction Adventures (UK) #29 for November 1962, and for the next four years appeared primarily in New Worlds; he wrote two stories with Ron Smith under the joint pseudonym Martin Loran (Loran being ...
Binns, Ottwell
(1872-1935) UK Congregational and then Unitarian minister and author, much better known as Ben Bolt, the pseudonym he used from around 1890, for his detective fiction and vigorous adventure tales, though his first novel in book form appeared as late as 1917; he also wrote as by Benjamin Bolt. Dan-Yeo; Or, the Island of the Lost (1929) as Ottwell Binns is a Lost Race tale set on an unknown Island in the South Pacific, ...
Xenoforming
A term logically based on the more familiar Terraforming, to denote the (usually gradual) transformation of a world to suit Alien rather than Earth-human Biology and Ecology. / The highest sf drama arises when xenoforming attempts are initiated by Extraterrestrials wishing to transform Earth for their own purposes. The Red Weed introduced ...
Evolution
There is, inevitably, an intimate connection between the development of evolutionary philosophy and the history of sf. In a culture without an evolutionary philosophy most of the kinds of fiction we categorize as sf could not develop. Like the idea of progress, evolutionary philosophy flourished in late eighteenth-century France, and it was first significantly represented in literature by Restif de la Bretonne's evolutionary fantasy ...
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 ...