SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 11 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.
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Van Loon, Hendrik Willem
(1882-1944) Dutch-born historian and author, permanently in the US from 1919 when he was naturalized; he is best known for The Story of Mankind (1921), written (unlike H G Wells's almost simultaneous undertaking) primarily for children. His first work of sf interest was "If the Dutch Had Kept Nieuw Amsterdam" (in If It had Happened Otherwise: Lapses into Imaginary History, anth 1931; vt If: or History Rewritten 1931, ed J C ...
Toxic Avenger, The
Film (1984). HCH/Troma/Palan. Directed by Michael Herz, Samuel Weil. Written by Joe Ritter, based on a story by Lloyd Kaufman. Cast includes Mitchell Cohen, Andree Maranda and Mark Torgl. 100 minutes, cut to 79 minutes. Colour. / After a cruel practical joke is played on him, a teenage nerd falls into a barrel of toxic waste in Tromaville, New Jersey, "Toxic Waste Capital of America". He mutates (see Mutants) into the low-budget ...
Lebow, Richard Ned
(1941- ) French-born political scientist, in US from infancy, prolific in his field for many years; he is of sf interest for two recent volumes. Forbidden Fruit: Counterfactuals and International Relations (2010) is a sustained analysis of Alternate History narratives, which he calls Counterfactuals, a term perhaps too easily understood to imply that historical facts are safely ...
Rusch, Kristine Kathryn
(1960- ) US editor and author who also writes as by Kristine Grayson and as by Kathryn Wesley; married to Dean Wesley Smith. She began publishing work of genre interest with "Sing" for Aboriginal Science Fiction, February/March 1987; she won the 1990 John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her work is strongly emotional in nature, some of it ...
Futurismic
UK-based website devoted to an interest in the future and the impact of science and technology on the present. The site was founded by Jeremy Lyons. The publisher is Paul Raven and the fiction editor is Christopher East. It has three sections, a blog, with links to items of news elsewhere on the internet; a column about science or sf; and a fiction section. It usually published just one story per month, starting in September 2004 with "Art's Appreciation" by Tom Doyle. The site ceased to ...
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 ...