SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 9 December 2025
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 8 December 2025
Sponsor of the day: Ted Chiang
DeMarce, Virginia
(1940- ) US historian specializing in early modern European history, who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Rudolstadt Colloquy" in Grantville Gazette for October 2003. This contribution to the Assiti Shards: 1632 Shared World was followed by many further short stories with the same Alternate-History background; DeMarce edited the related ...
Neverworlds
US/Canadian Online Magazine produced by Kevin L McPherson and Jonathon M Sullivan, which ran from April 1998 to February 2002 but of which all online record has now been lost or is inaccessible. Initially bimonthly, it saw at least seventeen issues and may have attained a monthly schedule by 2001, but the sheer workload involved at the time when there was considerable flux in the dot.com world may have contributed to its demise. It paid a graduated rate to ...
Planet Terror
Film (2007). Dimension Films presents a Rodriguez International Pictures release in association with Troublemaker Studios and The Weinstein Company. Directed by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino (uncredited). Written by Robert Rodriguez. Cast includes Naveen Andrews, Electra Avellan, Elise Avellan, Josh Brolin, Jeff Fahey, Rose McGowan, Michael Parks, Freddy Rodriguez, Marley Shelton and Bruce Willis. 103 minutes. Colour. / First conceived ...
World War Two
The 1939-1945 War was the central military convulsion of the twentieth century, anticipated in numerous Future War scenarios and succeeded – thanks to the climactic use of Nuclear Energy-based Weapons against Japanese Cities – by several Cold War decades overshadowed by the prospect of a nuclear ...
Bradshaw, William R
(1851-1927) Irish-born editor and author, in the US from 1883, whose The Goddess of Atvatabar: Being the History of the Discovery of the Interior World and Conquest of Atvatabar (1892) is set in a Symmesian Hollow Earth with an interior sun shining vertically overhead: "See how the shadow of every man surrounds his boots!". In his introduction, Julian Hawthorne asserts ...
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 ...