SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 10 May 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 4 May 2026
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Conway, Gerard F
(1952-2026) US author informally known as Gerry Conway who began his career in Comics, writing some non-fantastic scripts for Marvel Comics, and editing the short-lived 1973 weird fiction magazine The Haunt of Horror and writing for the 1973-1975 anthology Comic Worlds Unknown. He also worked extensively for ...
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 ...
Foundation [series]
Influential sf sequence by Isaac Asimov (whom see for fuller discussion), initially a trilogy beginning with Foundation (May 1942-October 1944 Astounding; fixup 1951; cut vt The 1,000 Year Plan 1955 dos), in which Psychohistory predicts the fall of a Galactic Empire and points the way to a newer, more stable organization of galactic ...
White, Jon Manchip
(1924-2013) UK poet, screenwriter and author, in US from 1965; active as a poet from 1943, and in Television and Radio from the late 1940s, working for the BBC (1950-1951) as a story editor and screenwriter; he also acted in a BBC television drama, A Tomb with a View (1950), from the novel by Lance Sieveking. Radio credits include an unsourced adaptation of ...
Space Patrol [game]
Role Playing Game (1977). Gamescience. Designed by Michael Scott Kurtick, Rockland Russo. / Similarly to such other early sf RPGs as Starfaring (1976) and Traveller (1977), Space Patrol concentrates on transposing the colourful adventures of traditional Space Opera to a new medium. Unlike ...
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 ...