SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 12 January 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.
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Ballard, Isaac Fowler
(1826-1897) UK tax officer ("supervisor of excise") and author of The Prophetic Future of the Empire of Great Britain: Dedicated to her Royal and Imperial Majesty the Queen (1871 chap), in which the Battle of Dorking scenario is taken to predict a Future History in which Britain triumphs. [JC]
Robot Monster
Film (1953; vt Monsters from Mars). Three Dimension Pictures. Directed by Phil Tucker. Written by Wyott Ordung. Cast includes Claudia Barrett, George Barrows, John Brown, Gregory Moffett, John Mylong, George Nader, Pamela Paulson and Selena Royle. 66 minutes. Black and white. / A boy named Johnny (Moffett) wearing a space helmet with air tubes is playing with a girl named Carla (Paulson), who wants to play house instead, but it soon transpires that they, and the human race, ...
Jefferson Starship
Also known as Jefferson Airplane, Jefferson Starship: The Next Generation and Starship. US psychedelic rock band, formed, as "Jefferson Airplane" in Los Angeles in 1965 by Marty Balin (1942-2018) and Paul Kantner, amongst others; later joined by Grace Slick (1939- ) whose songwriting skills and distinctive voice contributed a great deal to the commercial success of the band. The folk-rock and LSD-experimentalism of their early albums ...
Harkaway, Nick
Pseudonym of UK author Nicholas Cornwell (1972- ) whose first novel, The Gone-Away World (2008), applies toxic gouaches of Equipoise to a Post-Holocaust tale set in a surrealized Alternate World, where resemblances to the "real" world can be seen as diversionary: x or y may differ from consensual reality, and the telling of the tale may dwell on these ...
Light, John
(1943- ) UK poet and author, who began publishing sf for Robert Hale Limited with the Annals of Lavandrei sequence comprising The Well of Time (1981), The Lords of Hate (1997) and Conspiracy of the Dead (2004), Space Opera adventures consistent with Hale's requirements. In the Melgor Erdin sequence comprising No Space in Time ...
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 ...