SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 9 July 2025
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 2025
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Perfect Woman, The
Film (1949). Two Cities/Eagle-Lion. Directed by Bernard Knowles. Written by George Black, Knowles, based on the play The Perfect Woman (produced 1948; 1950) by Wallace Geoffrey and Basil Mitchell. Cast includes Pamela Devis, Irene Handl, Stanley Holloway, Miles Malleson, Nigel Patrick, Patricia Roc and Constance Smith. 89 minutes. Black and white. / An inventor creates a Robot in the image of his niece and hires a young man to take it out on ...
Space Detective
US Comic (1951-1952). Four issues. Avon Periodicals, Inc (see Avon Comics). Artists include Tex Blaisdell, Gene Fawcette, Joe Orlando and Wally Wood. Writers of scripts include Walter Gibson. Each issue has four comic strips, plus one or two short text stories (except #2). / Wealthy young philanthropist Rod Hathway's hobby is "relieving the miseries of the poor", but he also has a secret identity: ...
Avon Science Fiction and Fantasy Reader
US Digest-size magazine, two issues in 1953, published by Avon Books; edited by Sol Cohen. A hybrid successor to the Avon Fantasy Reader and Avon Science Fiction Reader, the Avon Science Fiction and Fantasy Reader series started a year after those had ceased publication and had a different policy, concentrating on original stories rather ...
Endore, S Guy
(1900-1970) US author, film scriptwriter and translator, some of whose realistic Fantasy novels can in a marginal sense be considered as sf (see Psychology). The best known is The Werewolf of Paris (1933), set in the shambles of 1871 Paris, where a French soldier is succumbing to lycanthropy (see Werewolves); this represents on a human scale the civic trauma of the body politic as the ...
Daniels, Sarah
(? - ) UK author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Open House" in Ghostlight for Spring 2019. Her first novel, The Stranded (2022), is set on a cruise ship that, quarantined for four decades after what seems to have been World War Three, has become a Ship of Fools featuring a grotesquely distorted social system based on neoliberal models of ...
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 ...