SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 12 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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Querry, Simon
(? - ) Author, perhaps pseudonymous, of whom nothing is known beyond the appearance of this byline on the unremarkable Adventures on the Planets (1954 chap), #1 in the shortlived Fantastic Science Thriller pocketbook series. Querry has sometimes been identified as a pseudonym of the woman who wrote as Erroll Collins, but stylistic evidence suggests otherwise. ...
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 ...
Adams, Sean
(? - ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Famous Detective and his Telepathy Goggles" in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet for April 2010. He is of strong sf interest for his first novel, The Heap (2020), which concentratedly depicts a collapsing Near Future America through the literal collapse of Los Verticalés, a ...
Hunter, Jim
(1939- ) UK author of The Flame (1966), a Near Future tale set in a Dystopian Britain taken over by right-wing forces; nothing assuages the bleakness of the narrative and its message. Percival and the Presence of God (1978) is a fantasy about the Matter of Britain [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. ...
Mois, Joseph
Author, possible pseudonym of Edith Redknap (see Errol Collins); certainly there is no evidence of an actual Joseph Mois. The byline appears on the unremarkable A Spot on the Sun (1954 chap), #3 in the shortlived Fantastic Science Thriller pocketbook series. [DRL/SH]
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 ...