SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 12 March 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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Bok, Hannes
Pseudonym of US illustrator, author, and astrologer Wayne Francis Woodard (1914-1964). Sf Illustration has had very few mavericks: Bok was possibly the most famous. He did not let editors and publishers dictate the way he designed his work, and thereby lost hundreds of commissions. As Brian W Aldiss notes in Science Fiction Art (1975), he was one of the field's "masters of the macabre", a stylist ...
Waldo
An item of sf Terminology originated by Robert A Heinlein in his short novel "Waldo" (August 1942 Astounding; with 1 other story as Waldo & Magic, Inc., coll 1950; vt Waldo: Genius in Orbit, coll 1958). The eponymous hero suffers from a crippling wasting of the muscles, and invents a number of remote-control grasping and manipulating devices, also called waldoes, to ...
Suspense
US Digest-size magazine. Published by Farrell Publishing Co, Chicago. Edited by Theodore Irwin. Four quarterly issues, Spring 1951 to Winter 1952. / Suspense was based on the CBS Radio series of the same name, which ran for some 945 episodes from 17 June 1942 to 30 September 1962. It included the script of one episode per issue, and also contained a mixture of detective, weird, sf and fantasy stories, including some reprints. The ...
Elliott, John
(1759-1834) UK author, imputed author (though he seems young for the task) of The Travels of Hildebrand Bowman ... (1778) as by Hildebrand Bowman, a Fantastic Voyage into various remote parts of the South Pacific, including Islands and Utopias, some in nether New Zealand; see Checklist for full title, which is thorough. It has been suggested in the magazine ...
Nanotechnology
Item of terminology borrowed by sf writers from theoreticians of future Technology, and increasingly popular in sf from the late 1980s. It seems to have been first used by K Eric Drexler in 1976, and popularized by him in his highly optimistic book on the subject, Engines of Creation (1986). / Nanotechnology – the term loosely combines "nano", the SI (metric system) prefix denoting 10-9, with "technology" – means the technology of the ...
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 ...