SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 7 July 2022
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.
Site updated on 4 July 2022
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Expanse
US Semiprozine, published and edited quarterly from Baltimore by Steven E Fick, letter-size format, three issues published, #1 (October) 1993, Winter 1994 and Summer 1994. A professionally produced magazine with eclectic design (each story set in a different font), it was a good example of what computer-aided design could now produce. With an announced print run high for a semiprozine, Expanse began intrepidly, proclaiming in advertisements: "Tired of the liberal bias in the stories you read? ...
Grove, William
(? -? ) UK author of whom nothing is known except that he was the author of A Mexican Mystery (1888) and its sequel, The Wreck of a World (1889). In the first volume, a brilliant Mexican engineer, descended from Montezuma, designs a self-feeding locomotive which, after his death, turns into a kind of Frankenstein Monster: malign; essentially indestructible; worshipped by savages in the deep mountains. (Hints that it/He is a kind of avenging spirit of the ...
Shimmer
US Online Magazine, semi-professional from issue #15 (Summer 2012), also available in print form for its first eighteen issues, though the print issues seldom sold more than 200 copies. It was published and edited by Beth Wodzinski in Salt Lake City, Utah, and planned as a quarterly from Autumn 2005 though it soon appeared only twice yearly from 2007 to 2013, and it was not until it shifted solely to online publication that it was able to appear bi-monthly from May 2014 to its final issue, #46, ...
Lee Tung
(? - ) Indian author whose interesting sf novel, The Wind Obeys Lama Toru (1967), is a complex story about Overpopulation in which fertility and sterility Drugs act and counteract, driving the population up and down disastrously until the year 2175. [JC]
Chu, Wesley
(? - ) Taiwan-born actor and author, in US from an early age, whose Tao sequence, comprising The Lives of Tao (2013), The Deaths of Tao (2014) and The Rebirths of Tao (2015), combines Technothriller riffs with a knowledgeable rendering of a traditional sf topos: Forerunner Alien beings called the Quasing who crashland on Earth and Uplift the human race until our science and Technology are sophisticated enough to repair their ship. The protagonist, who ...
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 ...