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
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Wheeler, J Craig
(1943- ) US astronomer, academic and author whose The Krone Experiment (1986) begins as a very Near Future Technothriller but soon expands its narrative grasp as the threat to Earth turns out to be a Black Hole that threatens to devour the planet. The nonfiction Cosmic Catastrophes: Exploding Stars, Black Holes, and Mapping the Universe (2007) is ...
Howell, George Rogers
(1833-1899) US educationist, editor and author of Noah's Log Book: How Two Americans Blasted the Ice on Mt Ararat and Found Noah's Ark and Some Curious Relics (coll 1898), the title tale describing the discovery of, and transcribing, Noah's journal. To this is appended "The Open Polar Sea: Its Discovery by an Unknown New Yorker, Believed to be From the East End of Long Island", whose narrator has travelled by Balloon to a clement ...
Wu, Frank
(1964- ) American artist and author, although he primarily earns his living by applying knowledge garnered from his PhD in bacterial genetics to the field of patent law. As a writer, Wu has mostly published short satirical pieces, some in the Journal of Irreproducible Results, although "Worlds in Collusion: A Planetary Romance" (in Visual Journeys, anth 2007, ed Eric Reynolds) attempts to strike a more serious note in describing an unusual romance. ...
Quinn, Seabury
(1889-1969) American lawyer and weird-fiction author whose first published story was "The Law of the Movies" (December 1917 The Motion Picture Magazine). Seabury Quinn was by far the most prolific contributor to Weird Tales; during its 31-year life he published well over a hundred stories there, appearing on average in roughly every other issue. Many of these contributions – 93 in all – featured his occult detective Jules de Grandin ...
Tales of Terror from the Beyond
US letter-size saddle-stapled weird-fiction magazine printed on newsprint. Published by Charlton Comics. Editor: Patrick Mansuelli. One issue only, Summer 1964. / This scarce publication is not a Media Magazine as such, but seems popular among collectors of such periodicals. Most of the stories are by Stanton A Coblentz, including several reprints from 1947-1950 issues 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 ...