SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 9 July 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 7 July 2025
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Valley of Eagles
Film (1951; vt Valley of the Eagles US). The J Arthur Rank Organization/Independent Sovereign Films (UK)/Lippert Films (US). Produced by Nat A Bronstein (as Nat Bronsten). Directed by Terence Young. Written by Young from an original story by Bronstein and Paul Tabori. Cast includes Anthony Dawson, Nadia Grey, Christopher Lee, John McCallum, Jack Warner and Mary Laura Wood. 86 minutes, sometimes cut to 82 minutes. Black and white. / Norwegian ...
Dessar, Leo Charles
(1847-1924) US judge and author whose The Royal Enchantress: A Romance of the Last Queen of the Berbers (1900) hovers comfortably between fantasy and sf in its recounting of the paranormal secret history of the historical Cahina, a late eighth-century partly-Jewish Berber ruler who opposed the Muslim conquest of inner Arabia. Her visions of the past and future have a Time Viewer intensity and detail. Her attempts to create a kind of ...
Barrett, Geoffrey John
(1928-1999) UK author who also published thrillers as Cole Rickard and Westerns as Bill Wade; his sf novels, written for Robert Hale Limited under his own name and as Edward Leighton, Dennis Summers and James Wallace, are consistently routine; as there seems to have been no intrinsic reason for selecting these different names, Barrett's sf is listed below as a single chronology. [JC]
Super Science Stories
1. US Pulp magazine which ran in two series for a total of 31 issues. Both series were run by Popular Publications, New York, the first under their imprint Fictioneers, Inc, which allowed them to pay cheaper word rates: 16 issues March 1940 to May 1943, with three consecutive 1941 issues (March, May and August) titled Super Science Novels; edited by Frederik Pohl until August 1941, then Ejler ...
Morley, Henry
(1822-1894) UK author, biographer, editor, critic and academic who was professor of literature at University College, London, 1865-1889. He wrote for and contributed to Charles Dickens's Household Words and All the Year Round. Morley is perhaps best remembered as editor of two popular literature series, Morley's Universal Library (1883-1885) for George Routledge and Sons and Cassell's National Library (1886-1890) for Cassell. The ...
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 ...