SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 17 October 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 12 October 2026
Sponsor of the day: Paul Giamatti
Edwards, Malcolm
(1949-2026) UK editor, critic and publisher, educated at Cambridge, where he graduated in anthropology. Active in UK sf Fandom in the 1970s and early 1980s, he published the first complete text of James Blish's "The Science in Science Fiction" (May 1951-May 1952 Science Fiction Quarterly) in his Fanzine Quicksilver #2 in 1971; edited the ...
Burke, Sue
(1955- ) US journalist, editor, translator and author; resident in Spain for at least seventeen years, until 2017. She began publishing work of genre interest with "Poet for Hire" in The Czamina Kid and Other Weird Tales: Mr Mike's First Milwaukee Omnibus (anth 1995) edited by Michael G Corenthal, though she had already worked for some time as a journalist and editor. The Semiosis sequence opening with her first novel, Semiosis (2018) ...
Parkman, Sydney
(1895-1995) UK author, usually of adventure fiction, but including two humorous sf tales: Ship Ashore (1936), in which the descendants of a seventeenth-century shipwreck are found on a mysterious Island off the coast of Borneo, and Life Begins Tomorrow (1947), the latter set in the Near Future. [JC]
Time Distortion
The pioneering sf story of distorted time is H G Wells's "The New Accelerator" (December 1901 Strand), introducing a Drug that "speeds up" Time for its users and makes the world around them seem almost to freeze. As far as others are concerned, the users have attained temporary Invisibility while in motion. Drugs achieve the same effect in ...
Grant, Donald M
(1927-2009) US Small-Press publisher whose imprints were the Grandon Company (formerly the Hadley Publishing Company, renamed after its buy-out by Grant) and, later, Donald M Grant Publisher. He published and co-compiled the early Bibliography "333": A Bibliography of the Science-Fantasy Novel (1953 chap) with Joseph H ...
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 ...