SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 22 September 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 18 September 2023
Sponsor of the day: Handheld Press
LaPointe, Michael
(1987- ) Canadian journalist and author in whose first novel The Creep (2021) a contemporary protagonist is led to investigate (and reinhabit her memories of) a dangerous medical experiment a decade before (see Medicine). She had been associated then with the mysterious Rubicon Tech, where a theoretically curative blood substitute, brewed from plastics, had been developed, with tragic consequences: when substituted for human ...
Britton, Lionel
(1887-1971) UK author and playwright, a conscientious objector during World War One who gained some prominence in the interwar period for Hunger and Love, Etc (1931), a speculative proletarian/modernist Dystopia, written before (and influential upon) but published after Brain: A Play of the Whole Earth (1930), a drama in which a giant Computer is set up in the Sahara to ...
Fantomah, Mystery Woman of the Jungle
US Comic strip created by Fletcher Hanks under the pseudonym Barclay Flagg. First appeared in Jungle Comics #2 (February 1940); last appearance in issue #51 (March 1944). The stories can be divided into three styles: original (issues #2-#15); jungle girl (#16-#26) and Egyptian queen (#27-#51) (see Ancient Egypt in SF). The first period, by some considerable margin, is the most interesting. / The original Fantomah's ...
Levin, Bernard
(1928-2004) UK journalist and critic best remembered for his vast output of often polemical and/or satirical newspaper essays, notably in The Times 1971-1997; nine volumes of selections, a small fraction of the total, appeared in book form. Levin's nonfiction A World Elsewhere (1994) is a popular survey of, and meditation upon, the various myths and dreams of Utopia – from ancient legends of Atlantis to ...
Macnee, Patrick
(1922-2015) UK actor (a US citizen from 1982) best known for playing the supremely suave, stylish and very British secret agent John Steed who with a succession of tough but glamorous female partners is pitted against numerous sf threats and ploys in The Avengers (1961-1969) and its successor The New Avengers (1976-1977). He receives sole cover credit for the Avengers Ties Deadline (1965) ...
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 ...