SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 12 July 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 7 July 2026
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Iron Man 2
Film (2010). Paramount Pictures and Marvel Entertainment present a Marvel Studios production in association with Fairview Entertainment. Directed by Jon Favreau. Written by Justin Theroux, based on the Marvel Comics series created by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, Jack Kirby, and Don Heck. Cast includes Don Cheadle, Robert Downey Jr, Scarlett Johansson, Gwyneth Paltrow, ...
Hardy, Kate A
(? - ) UK author whose Midday Sun trilogy beginning with Going out in the Midday Sun (2012) edges just past the present in its closing pages, with Climate Change threatening the cast. She is of greater sf interest for Hoxton (2016; vt Londonia 2020), set in a distant Near Future Dystopian ...
Captain Science
US Comic (1950-1951). Seven issues. Youthful Magazines. Artists include Bill Molno, Harry Harrison, Joe Orlando, Gustav Schrotter and Wally Wood. Four strips per issue (two involving Captain Science) plus a two-page text story or article ("Can Science Make Gold?"). / In 1950, whilst on a geological field trip in New Mexico, physicist Gordon Dane and his young protege Rip Gary witness a ...
Trout, Kilgore
An imaginary but hugely prolific sf-writer character in Kurt Vonnegut Jr's God Bless You, Mr Rosewater (1965), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Breakfast of Champions (1973) and such later novels as Jailbird (1979) and Timequake (1997), rather obviously echoing the name of Theodore Sturgeon. The name was first used as a pseudonym by L W ...
Hall, Louisa
(1982- ) US academic, poet and author who is of sf interest for her second novel, Speak (2015), a multi-voiced tale moderated and in part iterated by AIs, who have come to something like self-consciousness through a radical concept underlying their development: that consciousness is not generated by number-crunching but through the centripetal magnetism through time of storytelling. The figures depicted range from a young seventeenth ...
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 ...