SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 12 July 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.
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Farrer, Matthew
(1970- ) Australian author who also signs as Matt Farrer, most of whose work to date has consisted of contributions to the Warhammer 40,000 Role Playing Game universe, beginning with "Badlands Skelter's Downhive Monster Show" for Inferno! in 1999, and continuing with Warhammer 40,000: Crossfire (2003), which features the continuing character ...
Oceans of the Mind
US Online Magazine except for the first issue which was distributed as a Print Magazine in limited numbers. Published by Trantor Publications, Jacksonville, Florida and edited by Richard Freeborn, it ran for 19 quarterly issues, Fall 2001 to Spring 2006. Each issue had a theme for its stories and essays. The first issue's was Robots and alongside representative reprints by Isaac ...
Atherton, Gertrude
(1857-1948) US author, biographer and historian. In a long career that extended from 1882 to 1946 she published about 50 books in a multitude of genres, beginning to publish work of genre interest with "The Caves of Death" for San Francisco News Letter in 1886; her first novel was an occult romance involving metempsychosis, What Dreams May Come: A Romance (1888) as by Frank Lin (see Reincarnation). In ...
Wykes, Alan
(1914-1993) Prolific UK author, mainly of nonfiction, whose sf Satire Happyland (1952) depicts an arcadian fantasy-Island in which happiness is literally obtainable. A UK magnate turns the place into a holiday camp; a new kind of bomb finally eliminates it. The nonfiction H G Wells in the Cinema (1977) surveys all the films up to publication date based on H G Wells's fiction. [JC]
Original Anthologies
An original Anthology is an anthology in book format of stories that have not been previously published, and such volumes have played an important role in sf Publishing, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. For early and pioneering examples of original anthologies, see the broader discussion under Anthology. / This encyclopedia gives entries to original-anthology series devoted to sf and (with one ...
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 ...