SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 31 March 2023
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 29 March 2023
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Brown, Eric
(1960-2023) UK author who began publishing sf – after a children's play, Noel's Ark (1982 chap) – with "Krash-Bangg Joe and the Pineal-Zen Equation" for Interzone in Autumn 1987; like several further tales assembled in The Time-Lapsed Man and Other Stories (coll 1990), it is set in a future world dominated by the effects of bio-engineering and dense with information. This marriage of Cordwainer ...
Sullivan, Alan
(1868-1947) Canadian engineer, poet and author in the UK from around 1920 to 1940; prolific in various genres from 1891, including popular fiction as Sinclair Murray. Works of some interest include The Jade God (1924), In the Days of Their Youth (1926), a Posthumous Fantasy [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below], The Magic Makers (1930), in which Eskimos are overawed by ...
Reger, Rob
(1969- ) US Comics writer and author of the Emily the Strange sequence, for a readership extending upwards into the Young Adult range, beginning with Emily the Strange: The Lost Days (2009) with Jessica Gruner; the sequence is based on earlier manifestations of the protagonist, mainly as a Comics protagonist. The stories are presented in diary form, allowing for a ...
Ran-Dells
US SF Music trio from southern New Jersey, consisting of three first cousins who all attended Brandeis University: Steven Rappaport (1943-2007), Robert Rappaport (1943- ) and John Spirt (1949-2003). They are remembered for their one sf novelty hit, "The Martian Hop" (1963) an original composition which made it to #16 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in September 1963. The cousins were inspired by the then-current popular trend in dances ...
Thought Experiment
In Physics, a thought experiment or Gedankenexperiment is a common means of exploring the implications of scientific assumptions without resorting to actual apparatus. Einstein's development of Relativity employed thought experiments about light signals exchanged between observers whose relative speed was a significant fraction of the speed of light, not easily attained by any real observer or (at that time) measuring device. 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 ...