SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 28 January 2022
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 24 January 2022
Sponsor of the day: David J Lally
Stone, Graham
(1926-2013) Australian bibliographer, involved in Australian Fandom for many years; his only fiction, Zero Equals Nothing (1951 chap) with Royce Williams, is a Space Opera. His main focus in the Australian sf world lay in his creation of several Bibliographies: first of the Australian field, beginning with Australian Science Fiction Index, 1939-1962 (1964); then of British sf, with Index to British Science Fiction Magazines 1934-1953 (1968-1971 3vols; exp 1977-1980 3vols). He received the ...
Fox, Samuel Middleton
(1856-1941) UK playwright and author whose anonymously published sf novel, Our Own Pompeii: A Romance of Tomorrow (1887 2vols) is a fairly mild-mannered Satire of high society featuring a pleasure city on the Riviera which proves too expensive to run. [JC]
Szabó-Zalán, Nicholas
(?1886-? ) Hungarian author, in active service during World War One, seemingly in Argentina from some point around 1945, after Hungary began to slip into the grasp of the USSR. Mission to Earth (1955) – whose apparent subtitle, The Book of Many Colours, appears only on the dust jacket – presents a kind of sacred drama in terms of a roughshod Equipoise. The Alien who lands his Spaceship on Earth is also St Peter on a fact-finding mission on the behalf of God. In ...
Portal
Videogame (1986). Nexa Corporation. Designed by Rob Swigart. Platforms: Amiga, AppleII, AtariST, C64, Mac, PCBoot. / Portal was an attempt to create a "computer novel", a form that was intended to more closely resemble that of hyperfiction (see Hypertext) than that of the text Adventure. The player takes the part of an astronaut sent on a solitary mission of exploration in a slower-than-light Starship. When they return, a century after their departure, Earth is deserted and the only ...
Boston, Bruce
(1943- ) US poet (see Poetry) and prose author whose early work tended to the surreal, but who began – with stories like "Break" for New Worlds 7 (anth 1974) edited by Hilary Bailey and Charles Platt – to invoke fantasy and sf themes. His early poetry – much of it not genre at all, and almost all of it couched in a classically lucid voice – can most easily be approached through Jackbird: Tales of Illusion & Identity (coll 1976 chap); it is ...
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 ...