SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 13 January 2025
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.
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Eckert, Allan W
(1931-2011) US television writer – he is credited with over 200 scripts for the nonfiction animal series, Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom (1963-1988), for which he won an Emmy Award – and author, mainly of works of natural history, for which he has seven times been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and of fiction in various genres; his first novel, The Great Auk: A Novel (1963), containing no elements of the fantastic. He began writing work of genre ...
Hurley, Graham
(1946- ) UK television scriptwriter and producer and author whose first novel, Rules of Engagement (1990; rev 1991), is based on his own 1989 Near Future Television drama, Rules of Engagement (1989 6 episodes), set in the sealed-off English city of Portsmouth just on the eve of World War Three. His later books, mainly the ...
Cross, Gillian
(1945- ) UK author, primarily for children, in various genres, including the Demon Headmaster sequence of horror tales [see Checklist below]. Of sf interest are Born of the Sun (1983), in which the search for an Incan Lost World intersects with family romance; New World (1992), in which adventures within a Virtual Reality world turn nightmarish; ...
Platonov, Andrey
Working name of Russian author Andrew Platonovich Klimentov (1899-1951), best known for his mainstream fiction, in particular his portrayals of ordinary humans caught in the gears of totalizing (but savagely ineffective) Technology. One of the most talented figures active in the first decades after the 1917 Revolution, he was regarded with suspicion by "official" literary critics and much of his work did not appear in Russia for many ...
Gold, H L
(1914-1996) Canadian-born author and editor, in the USA from the age of two, though retaining dual nationality; brother of Floyd C Gale. Gold began to publish work of genre interest with "Inflexure" for Astounding in October 1934 as by Clyde Crane Campbell, selling several stories to that market, and to its sister Unknown, notably None But Lucifer (September 1939 Unknown; ...
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 ...