SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 19 April 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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Butler, Ewan
(1911-1974) UK journalist (The Times, Daily Mail) and author, son of Sir Harold Butler, a politician who founded the International Labour Office in Geneva; educated at Eton; served in World War Two. In his supernatural thriller, "Talk of the Devil" (1948), the Devil visits England with foul consequences. Of sf interest is his Hitler Wins tale, ...
Hayward, Abraham
(1801-1884) UK lawyer, man of letters and translator, well known for biographical and critical essays, and for an early (but prose) translation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust (1808; 1832; trans Hayard 1833). Of sf interest is The Second Armada: A Chapter of Future History (22 June 1871 The London Times; 1871 chap; vt [for full title see Checklist] 1871 chap) anonymous, a Future War tale in which ...
Watts, Peter
(1958- ) Canadian marine biologist and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "A Niche" in Tesseracts3 (anth 1990) edited by Candas Jane Dorsey and Gerry Truscott; his early short fiction was assembled as Ten Monkeys, Ten Minutes (coll 2001); Beyond the Rift (coll 2013) mostly assembles more recent stories. He is very much better known, however, for his longer work, in ...
Glaser, Milton
(1929-2020) US graphic designer and typeface designer who co-founded Push Pin Studios in 1954 and set up his own design company Milton Glaser Inc in 1974. His work includes more than 400 posters, New York's iconic logo I ♥ NY (1977) and the "bullet" logo used by DC Comics from 1977 to 2005. Glaser's often deceptively simple but always striking book cover designs appeared on a number of titles of genre interest, including Clifton ...
Casparian, Gregory
(1856-1942) Turkish-Armenia-born painter, photo-engraver and author, whose distant Near Future sf novel, An Anglo-American Alliance: A Serio-Comic Romance and Forecast of the Future (1906), frames its central story with a description of a twentieth-century world dominated by America and the UK; Technology has advanced in various ways; Sex can be determined prenatally; ...
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 ...