SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 13 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.
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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 ...
Clow, Martha deMey
(1932-2010) US artist, graphic designer, architect and author, whose sf novel, Starbreed (1970), is about an adolescent boy with Superpowers who bursts into prominence. [JC]
THX 1138
Film (1971). American Zoetrope/Warner Bros. Directed by George Lucas. Written by Lucas, Walter Murch, from a story by Lucas. Cast includes Robert Duvall, Maggie McOmie and Donald Pleasence. 88 minutes, restored to 95 minutes. Colour. / A subterranean future society is governed repressively by Computers and bland human Technocrats who keep the population under control with ...
Dollens, Morris Scott
(1920-1994) US artist – also as Morris Dollens, Maurice S Dollens and M S Dollens – who produced early work for Fanzines and began professional SF Magazine appearances in the late 1950s with one-off covers for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (November 1957), Venture Science Fiction (May 1958) and Fantastic ...
Cryogenics
From a Greek root meaning "cold-producing", this word is used in Physics to mean the production of extremely low temperatures and the study of phenomena at those temperatures. The shorter word Cryonics was more commonly used in sf Terminology when – as is usual – it is people or other living organic materials that are frozen. This short version has since been adopted for real-world freezing of ...
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 ...