SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 15 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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Javor, Frank A
Working name of US author Francis Anthony Jaworski (1916-2003), who wrote an estimated 10,000 "how to" articles for service magazines; he also wrote as F A Javor. He published six stories in sf magazines in 1963 and 1964, his first such appearance being "Patriot" (August 1963 Analog); three tales were included in the Judith Merril Year's Best S-F series of anthologies. The Eli Pike series of sf novels – ...
Coffindaffer, Rebecca
(? - ) US author whose Young Adult Crownchasers Space Opera sequence, beginning with Crownchasers (2020), follows the tribulations of an heir to the throne of a Galactic Empire after she discovers that she – and other aspirants – must chase a "royal seal" down the star lanes; the one who finds this ...
Robertson, Dale
(? - ) US author known only for The Son of the Phantom (1944), a Tie to the Comic The Phantom scripted by Lee Falk. The novel is based on the 1944-1945 newspaper storyline "The Childhood of the Phantom", telling of the young Phantom's jungle childhood, US education, and return to Africa to inherit the crime-fighting role of ...
Reincarnation
The idea of reincarnation exerts a considerable fascination; its fashionability was renewed in the latter decades of the twentieth century by Hypnotists who claimed to facilitate a "regression" of their subjects which allows access to memories of "former lives". Serial reincarnation is one of the standard varieties of Immortality. In Fantasy the notion is an axiom of the curious subgenre of "transcendental ...
Drink Tank, The
US Fanzine edited by Chris Garcia (some issues co-edited by James Bacon), published from California, 2005-current; electronic format. / From relatively humble beginnings as an outlet for Garcia's own writing, The Drink Tank has become (in part due to its remorseless frequency) a notable fanzine of the twenty-first century; it won the fanzine Hugo in 2011 after being nominated in every year from 2007 to 2010. While still featuring ...
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 ...