SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 15 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 11 December 2025
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Varley, John
(1947-2025) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Picnic on Nearside" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for August 1974, and who was soon thought to be the most significant new sf writer of the late 1970s. He was fresh, he was complex, he understood the imaginative implications of transformative developments like cloning (see Clones) and Identity Transfer, many of ...
Science Fantasy
In the Terminology of sf readers, and more especially publishers, this term in its usual sense of something distinct or partly distinct from Science Fiction has never been clearly defined, though Joseph M Crawford, James J Donahue and Donald M Grant, in their "333": A Bibliography of the Science-Fantasy Novel (1953 chap), attempted without much luck to establish it as an ...
Dune [series]
The best-known sf sequence by Frank Herbert, whose opening novel Dune (December 1963-February 1964 Analog as "Dune World"; January-May 1965 Analog as "The Prophet of Dune"; fixup 1965) offers a heady mixture of desert Ecology – in particular the complex life cycle of the titular world's immense, devouring sandworms – galactic ...
Black Scorpion
US tv series. (2001). Chum Television for the Sci Fi Channel. Created by Roger Corman and Craig J Nevius. Directors included Tim Andrew, David Blass, Gwyneth Gibby and Rob Spera. Writers included Steve Gentile, Nick Guthe and Malcolm Stephens. Cast includes BT (Brandon Terrell), Michelle Lintel and Scott Valentine. 22 60-minute episodes. Colour. / Police detective Darcy Walker (Lintel) works in Angel City, a thinly ...
Santos, Domingo
Pseudonym of Spanish author, editor, translator, anthologist and columnist Pedro Domingo Mutiñó (1941-2018), the major contemporary Spanish sf writer, considered as the father of sf in his country. Throughout a lifetime devoted to sf he published about forty novels (several in collaboration), a dozen collections, a hundred stories, fifty Anthologies, almost a thousand translated works, and hundreds of articles, ...
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 ...