SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 16 September 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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McGivern, William P
(1918-1982) US author, mostly of noir crime, who began publishing work of genre interest with "The Visible Invisible Man" in Amazing Stories for December 1940, and remained very prolific, initially under two pseudonyms that later became House Names: P F Costello, this name being annexed by Ziff-Davis, and Gerald Vance, and wrote one story ...
Kensett, Percy F
(1868-1940) UK author of The Amulet of Tarv: A Romance of the South Downs, 1,000 BC (1925), a Prehistoric SF tale whose present-day protagonists are given access via Time Viewer to the era in question; they are then able to establish Communications with the past. [JC]
Morley, Christopher
(1890-1957) US author and man of letters, brother of Felix Morley, who remains best known for mildly fantasticated (but not fantasy) tales like Parnassus on Wheels (1917) and The Haunted Bookshop (1919), and for Kitty Foyle (1939), a sentimental romance. He was a founding member of the Book-of-the-Month club, serving as a selector from 1928 to 1956; and co-founded the Baker Street Irregulars in 1934 (see Arthur Conan ...
Futures Studies
"Futures Studies" is the most common name for the interdisciplinary study of potential future developments and conditions. It has displaced earlier terms like Futurology and Futuristics which reflected the goal of creating a new discipline with mathematical tools capable of accurate Prediction. Frequent failures of prediction have tempered that ambition and complexity theory has highlighted the inability of any forecasting methods ...
Phillips, Peter
(1920-2012) UK author and journalist, whose first published story was "No Silence for Maloeween" (May 1948 Weird Tales), and who was noted for a number of stories published during the decade 1948-1957 – especially "Dreams are Sacred" (September 1948 Astounding), regarded as one of the primary texts about dream worlds and psychic Virtual Reality. A man links minds with a writer in a coma and enters ...
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 ...