SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 16 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.
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Bowman, W E
(1911-1985) UK draughtsman, civil engineer and author whose best-known work is The Ascent of Rum Doodle (1956), a Parody of British mountaineering expedition reports which quickly gained a cult following. An utterly inept team led by the pompous, Pooteresque "Binder" (his codename in walkie-talkie communications), and including an easily distracted Scientist, ascends or rather fails to ascend the titular mountain. The ...
Wollheim, Donald A
(1914-1990) US editor and author, and one of the first and most vociferous sf fans; with Forrest J Ackerman, Wollheim was perhaps the most dynamic member of the embryo Fandom of the 1930s. A lifetime resident of New York City, he published innumerable Fanzines, was co-editor of the early semiprozine Fanciful Tales of Time and Space in 1936, founded ...
Definitions of SF
The term Science Fiction came into general use in the 1930s, an early appearance being in Hugo Gernsback's editorial to #1 of Wonder Stories (June 1929); its first use on the cover of a standalone book may be the first volume in Gernsback's Science Fiction Series, The Girl from Mars (1929 chap) by Miles J ...
Wood, Samuel Andrew
(1887-1966) UK journalist and prolific author, mostly of thrillers (some as by Robin Temple), active in the Magazines from about 1911; he wrote four works of some interest, three of them Lost Race tales: The Isle of Forgotten People (1925) as by Thompson Cross, an unusually violent example of this subgenre set in a radium-rich ring of extinct volcanoes in China; Winged Heels (1927), in which a quest for a ...
OA, The
US online tv series (2016-current). Plan B Entertainment and Anonymous Content for Netflix. Created by Zal Batmanglij and Brit Marling. Directed by Zal Batmanglij. Written by Zal Batmanglij, Brit Marling, Melanie Marnich, Dominic Orlando and Ruby Rae Spiegel. Cast includes Hiam Abbass, Riz Ahmed, Ian Alexander, Will Brill, Emory Cohen, Patrick Gibson, Jason Isaacs, Alice Krige, Brit Marling, Brendan Meyer, Nikolai Nikolaeff, Brandon Perea, Phyllis Smith, Zoey Todorovsky, Paz Vega and ...
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 ...