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.
Site updated on 7 July 2025
Sponsor of the day: Ted Chiang
Gibson, Michael Ferris
(? - ) US author of the Babylon Twins Young Adult sequence beginning with Babylon Twins (2019) as M F Gibson, set in a Near Future Dystopian Earth run by AIs; the young protagonist and her Clones, immune to mind control, rebel(s). [JC]
SF Megatext
Science fiction is written in a kind of code, a difficult vernacular learned through an apprenticeship. Its decoding depends importantly on access to a megatext – the huge body of established moves or reading protocols that the reader learns through immersion in many hundreds of sf short stories and novels (and, with significantly less sophistication, from movies, television episodes, and games). The sf megatext comprises a virtual encyclopedia and specialized dictionary. For a story to ...
Sommerfeld, Adolf
(1870-1943) German journalist and author of a Future War novel, Frankreichs Ende im Jahre 19?? (1912; rev 1914; trans Louis G Redmont as How Germany Crushed France: (The Story of the Greatest Conspiracy in History) 1915), in which Germany, trusting safely in the neutrality of Britain and Russia, utterly defeats France in a very Near Future 1915. / Sommerfeld should ...
Apple, A E
(1891-1963) US author of ramshackle crime thrillers, mostly at shorter lengths for Detective Story Magazine; these stories include a series featuring the Chinese Villain Mr Chang, something of a Yellow Peril figure though hardly in the Fu Manchu class. In the novel Mr Chang's Crime Ray: A Detective Story (9 April 1927 Detective Story Magazine; fixup 1928), Chang is ...
Stone, George
(? - ) US author whose Near Future sf novel Blizzard (1977; vt Freeze 1979) in which an American admiral, by activating sea-bottom nuclear reactors, creates a circular blizzard system that eventually covers most of America. The ultimate consequence is Climate Change leading to a new Ice Age. [JC]
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 ...