SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 24 April 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 21 April 2025
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Broderick, Damien
(1944-2025) Australian author, editor and critic; he had a PhD in the semiotics of fiction, science and sf with special reference to the work of Samuel R Delany. He edited four anthologies of Australian sf: The Zeitgeist Machine (anth 1977), Strange Attractors (anth 1985), Matilda at the Speed of Light (anth 1988) and Centaurus: The Best of Australian Science Fiction (anth ...
Kusano Gengen
(1990- ) Pseudonymous Japanese author and essayist whose sudden appearance on the literary scene in 2016 may be considered a manifestation of the underlying, shadowy power not only of modern Fandom, but also electronic Light Novel publishing and social media. A graduate of Keiō University's faculty of Environment and Information Studies, Kusano moved to Hokkaidō to pursue a ...
Abernathy, Robert
(1924-1990) US teacher and author who began to publish his short fiction with "Heritage" for Astounding in June 1942, and whose work – about 40 stories overall – appeared regularly in the sf magazines until 1956. During the 1940s, his most consistent market was Planet Stories, for which he wrote such stories as "Peril of the Blue World" (Winter 1942 Planet Stories), "Saboteur of Space" ...
Laserblast
Film (1978). Irwin Yablans. Produced by Charles Band. Directed by Michael Rae. Written by Franne Schacht, Frank Ray Perilli. Cast includes Kim Milford, Gianni Russo and Cheryl Smith. 80 minutes. Colour. / In this ill-made, low-budget exploitation movie a miserable teenager finds in the desert an amulet and a laser left by Aliens. The amulet makes his eyes glow red; taken over by the alien persona, he revenges himself with ...
Farrago's Wainscot
US Online Magazine of experimental fiction and estrangement produced by Darin Bradley of Greenville, South Carolina. It ran for twelve loosely themed issues between Winter (January) 2007 and October 2009, and was then revived in January 2015 for four quarterly online issues before folding. Most of the fiction and poetry was some form of the fantastic, often surreal, post-modern, rarely traditional, and it attracted many new, young fantasists, amongst them ...
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 ...