SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 14 August 2026
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 August 2026
Sponsor of the day: David Cowhig
Crowley, John
(1942-2026) US teacher and author who also worked in documentary films and television for some time beginning in 1966. His sf novels have had a considerable impact on the field, and his fantasies established him as a figure whose work courteously but deeply stretched the boundaries of genre literature. / His first novel, The Deep (1975), is set on a flat discworld resting on a pillar that extends beyond measurement into the circumambient galactic Deep, in which very few stars ...
Sladek, John T
(1937-2000) US author who spent two decades in the UK from 1966, becoming involved in the UK New-Wave movement centred on Michael Moorcock's New Worlds, and co-editing with Pamela Zoline Ronald Reagan: The Magazine of Poetry (2 issues, 1968 and 1970), where work by both editors, J G Ballard, Thomas M ...
Flynn, Danny
Working name of UK artist Anthony Flynn (1958- ), who took a degree in Illustration at Kingston University, London. Usually working in airbrushed acrylics, he was an active creator of UK paperback covers from the mid-1980s to the end of the twentieth century; early examples (often from New English Library) included reissues of Robert A Heinlein's ...
Bade, William L
(1928-2005) US academic, physicist (he did work for NASA) and author, who began publishing Hard SF with "Advent" in Astounding for January 1948, beginning the short Advent series of five tales ending with "The Eight Hundredth Hundred-Day" (Fall 1953 Fantastic Worlds). Besides this sequence he wrote three other stories, none remarkable. [JC]
Tales of Horror
US Comic (1952-1954). Minoan Publishing Corp/Toby Press Inc. 13 issues. Artists include Ben Brown, Max Elkin, Myron Fass, Mel Keefer, Rocco "Rocke" Mastroserio and Jack Sparling. Script writers include Art Helfant. 36 pages per issue, usually with four long strips and a short text story (though these are absent in some of the early issues), plus short strips as filler. / Though this is a Horror comic, sf and ...
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 ...