SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 14 February 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 11 February 2025
Sponsor of the day: Glasgow 2024 (Worldcon)
Moore, Chris
(1947-2025) Prolific UK artist, known to the public primarily for his hard-edged treatment of Hard SF subjects, although in fact he produced covers in different styles for all sorts of other genres as well, including illustrations of record sleeves for artists as diverse as Rod Stewart, Fleetwood Mac, Status Quo and Pentangle. What impressed most about Moore's sf art was not just the photographic realism but the sense of scale, achieved largely through a ...
Roche, Eugenius
(1780/1786-1829) Either a French-born author in the UK from his late teens, or (slightly less likely) an Irish-born writer raised in France and in the UK from his early twenties; in any case, his career in London as journalist and playwright was financially disastrous, litigious, and he left many children in extreme poverty after his early death. The long title poem of his posthumous London in a Thousand Years (coll 1830), is a contemplation, in the mode of the ...
Halifax, Clifford
Pseudonym of UK physician and author Edgar Beaumont (1860-1921) used (it seems exclusively) for his collaborations with L T Meade, beginning with This Troublesome World (1893 3vols), both anonymous, about a doctor who uses psychotropic Drugs to gain his will; and on various stories published in the Strand Magazine in the course of which mysteries – occult or sf in nature ...
Chapbook
In the early nineteenth century this term described a pamphlet on any of a wide range of subjects – from sermons to sensational tales, often illustrated with woodcuts – sold not through bookshops but by "chapmen", who hawked their wares. In the later nineteenth century, the term began to acquire a contrived antiquarian air, and was used to designate a small book or pamphlet produced for collectors. Although the fake antiquarianism attached to the term has since faded, chapbooks in ...
Gunn, Neil M
(1891-1973) Scottish author and civil servant, author of many novels, the first being Grey Coast (1926). It and some others – like Morning Tide (1931), The Lost Glen (1932), Second Sight (1940) and The Silver Bough (1948) – contain fantasy elements of interest, reminiscent at times of the Celtic Twilight writings of Fiona MacLeod (William Sharp, 1855-1905) [see The ...
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 ...