SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 22 June 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 16 June 2025
Sponsor of the day: Conversation 2023
Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Captain Nice
US tv series (1967). Talent Associates and Paramount Television with NBC Productions for NBC-TV. Created by Buck Henry. Produced by Jay Sandrich. Executive Producer Henry. Directors included Gary Nelson, Charles Rondeau, and Gene Reynolds. Writers included Henry, Stan Burns, David Ketchum, and Martin Ragaway. Cast includes William Daniels, Alice Ghostley, Ann Prentiss and Bill Zuzkert (Chief Segal). Liam Dunn and Byron Foulger appeared at times as Mayor Finney and Mr Nash respectively. ...
Willeford, Charles
(1919-1988) US soldier – much decorated in World War Two – and author, best known for noir crime thrillers like The Burnt Orange Heresy (1971) and for the equally dark police thrillers in the Miami-based Hoke Moseley series, most famously the first title in the sequence, Miami Blues (1984). In a prefiguration of the surreal juxtapositions examined in his work, Willeford's first novel, High Priest of California (1953), was bound with a ...
Herrick, Robert
(1868-1938) US academic, diplomat and author best known for The Master of the Inn (1908), whose eponymous hero cures the mentally ill by making them work hard while contemplating the purposelessness of life as our governors and religionists would have it. His one sf novel, Sometime (1933), set mostly in Africa 1000 years hence, describes en passant the visit of some Africans to a post-ice-age North America (see ...
Myerson, Julie
(1960- ) UK journalist and author whose novels, beginning with Sleepwalking (1994), are often infiltrated by supernatural elements, sometimes as in this case family ghosts. The protagonist of The Story of You (2006) is haunted by what may be the ghost of a man she broke up with decades ago; the Young Adult Out of Breath (2008) tests the growth trajectory of a young woman through her encounters with ...
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. He began to publish work of genre interest with an sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" in Triquarterly for Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959]; he began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and later in ...