SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 12 March 2026
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 9 March 2026
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Science Fiction Stories
US Pulp and subsequent Digest magazine which ran in two separate series and under several variant titles. Published by Blue Ribbon Magazines Inc (March-December 1939), Double Action Magazines Inc (March 1940-January 1941) and thereafter by Columbia Publications, New York; first series edited by Charles D Hornig (March 1939-September 1941) and the second series, 1953 to May 1960, was edited by Robert A W ...
Wilson, Robert Charles
(1953- ) US-born author, in Canada from 1962, who began to publish sf with "Equinocturne" in Analog for February 1975 as by Bob Chuck Wilson, though he did not make a significant impact on the field until the 1980s. It was then that he began to publish his polished and inventive novels, which from the first tend to posit an emotion-drenched binary between the mundane world and a better or more intense or intriguingly more alive otherworld, which ...
Files, Meg
(1946- ) US academic, poet and author whose Meridian 144 (1991) follows the complex life of its protagonist after a world-decimating accidental nuclear Holocaust – she had been scuba-diving in the South Seas at the time – interweaving memories of her stressed earlier life and action decisions necessary in the Post-Holocaust world as she attempts to create an ...
Areton, Emil Cohen
(1951- ) US author of The New Atlanteans: A Science Fiction Novel Based on Our Past and Future (1994), in which survivors from Atlantis have complex effects upon twentieth-century history. [JC]
Bedsheet
A term used erroneously to describe a Magazine format, ostensibly in contrast to Pulp and Digest. The size implied – sometimes called large pulp format – is the largest of the three; it varies slightly but approximates 11¾in x 8½in (298 x 216 mm) – i.e., close to A4 (297 x 210 mm). The term was given general currency when included by Richard "Dick" ...
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 ...