SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 18 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 17 February 2025
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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 ...
Rhodes, W H
(1822-1876) US lawyer, poet and author whose early work, like The Indian Gallows and Other Poems in Two Parts (coll 1846), but who soon began to publish newspaper pieces and stories under the name Caxton, notably The Case of Summerfield (13 May 1871 Sacramento Daily Union; 1907 chap), about a scientist who threatens to use his Invention – a technique for setting the oceans afire using potassium – unless he is paid a ...
Breggin, Peter
(1936- ) US medical doctor and author who has published and broadcast controversially about psychiatry and the drug industry, whose collaboration in promulgating drug-based solutions to psychiatric and other problems he deprecates; his sf novel, After the Good War: A Love Story (1972), excoriates the use of remote-control Sex as a device to control, and to dehumanize, a Dystopian twenty-third-century ...
Stannard, Russell
(1931- ) UK physicist and author, much of whose nonfiction attempts to reconcile modern science and Religion. He is of sf interest for the Uncle Albert series of didactic tales for relatively young readers beginning with The Time and Space of Uncle Albert (1989). The structure of the sequence – children present Uncle Albert with questions, which he answers through guided tours of the physical universe – ...
Baker, Adam
(1969- ) UK author whose Near Future Outpost Universe sequence beginning with Outpost (2011) follows the actions of a mixed group of survivors of a worldwide Pandemic, a Zombie Apocalypse plague which transforms its victims into rampaging metallic Monsters. The cast, which has survived this Disaster in an ...
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 ...