SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 16 November 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 10 November 2025
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Seidenberg, Roderick
(1889-1973) German-born architect and author, in USA from 1910 or earlier; imprisoned 1918-1920 as a World War One conscientious objector, an experience he describes in "I Refuse to Serve" (1932 Mercury). Also in the 1930s, while designing several buildings in New York, he published essays on the fragile culture of the urban world. In the 1930s, while designing several buildings in New York, he also contributed essays to various journals. His first ...
Charteris, Leslie
(1907-1993) US author born as Leslie Charles Bowyer Yin in Singapore, educated in the UK; he legally changed his name to Leslie Charteris in 1928, and became a US citizen in 1946. He remains known almost exclusively for the long picaresque crime/thriller sequence featuring Simon Templar alias The Saint. This saga began with the author's second novel Meet the Tiger! (1928; vt The Saint Meets the Tiger 1940), though Charteris experimented with and discarded ...
Pax Aeronautica
The sense that air Transportation must dramatically change the tactics and strategy of Future War was articulated in the eighteenth century by Samuel Johnson in his Proto SF Rasselas (1759): / Against an army sailing through the clouds neither walls, nor mountains, nor seas, could afford any security ... Even this valley, the retreat of ...
Griffith, George
Pseudonym of UK traveller, journalist, poet and author born George Chetwynd Griffith-Jones (1857-1906), the son of a clergyman and one of the most influential sf writers of his time; active as a poet in the 1880s, his first book being Poems (coll 1883 chap) as by Lara; he legally became George Griffith in 1894. He appeared frequently in the pre-sf Magazines and Pulp magazines, particularly ...
Woodhouse, Martin
(1932-2011) UK physician (non-practising), entrepreneur, screenwriter and author, whose first work of sf interest seems to have been the story "The Higher Mathematics" as M C Woodhouse for Authentic Science Fiction #46 in June 1954. More significant was his collaboration, with his brother Hugh Woodhouse, as screenwriter for twenty-two of the twenty-six scripts for the 1961 first season of the weekly Television puppet ...
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 ...