SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 24 June 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.
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Donnelly, Marcos
(1962- ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "As a Still Small Voice" for Full Spectrum 2 (anth 1989) edited by Lou Aronica, Shawna McCarthy, Amy Stout and Pat LoBrutto, and whose continuing, comic, Satirical focus on issues of Religion in a Western World increasingly assaulted ...
Pathfinders Series
These are four UK tv series that aired in 1960 and 1961, featuring recurring characters who engage in pioneering flights to the Moon, Mars and Venus. / 1. Target: Luna (1960). ABC Weekend Television. (Production credits assumed to be the same as those of the other three series.) Produced by Sydney Newman. Directed by Guy Verney. Written by Malcolm Hulke and ...
Lance, Kathryn
(1943- ) US author, much of whose work has consisted of non-sf tales for children, almost always as by Lynn Beach [see selection in Checklist below], and other non-sf Young Adult tales. Her sf has been restricted to the Pandora sequence – Pandora's Genes (1985) and Pandora's Children (1986) – set in an environmentally degraded, Mutant-rife ...
Schorer, Mark
(1908-1977) US author and academic, little associated with the literatures of the fantastic except for some stories with August Derleth, with whom he shared a birth city as well as attendance at the University of Wisconsin, where they wrote sf like "Riders in the Sky" (May 1928 Weird Tales), about Moon dwellers who come down to Earth to eat folk. Some of their later work was assembled as ...
Artzybasheff, Boris
(1899-1965) Ukraine-born US illustrator who fled to the US after the Russian Revolution. Although much of his prodigious output – he painted over 200 covers for Time magazine – had a fantasticated feel to it, only a small portion is directly relevant to the fantastic genres. Most notable among these are his cover for the 1926 US reissue of E R Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros (1922) and his set of interior ...
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 ...