SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 9 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: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Snicket, Lemony
Pseudonym of US author Daniel Handler (1970- ), who has also written mainstream novels under his own name. As Snicket he is best known for the thirteen-book sequence A Series of Unfortunate Events, running from The Bad Beginning (1999) to The End (2006), presented as children's fiction but larded with considerable black Humour, Gothic grotesquerie and mock didacticism by the ...
I Killed Einstein, Gentlemen
Czech film (1970); original title Zabil jsem Einsteina, pánové. Directed by Oldřich Lipský. Written by Oldřich Lipský and Miloš Macourek, based on a story by Josef Nesvadba. Cast includes Jana Brejchová, Radoslav Brzobohatý, Petr Čepek, Iva Janžurová, Lubomír Lipský and Jiří Sovák. 95 minutes. Colour. ...
Rose, Heather
(1964- ) Australian author whose Tuesday McGillycuddy sequence with Danielle Wood under the joint pseudonym Angelica Banks, and beginning with Finding Serendipity (2013), is fantasy for younger readers. Rose is of sf interest for the Near Future Bruny (2019), set just after an American president has engineered a second term and Brexit is in force; in Tasmania, a Chinese-financed and -engineered project to ...
Piercy, Marge
(1936- ) US author who has become recognized as a significant voice of US Feminism, initially with Poetry in volumes like Breaking Camp (coll 1968) but more importantly in novels like Going Down Fast (1969) and Vida (1980). Her first sf novel, Dance the Eagle to Sleep (1970), deals with an attempt by a group of student revolutionaries to set up a loving, ...
Blasim, Hassan
Working name of Iraqi filmmaker and author Hasan Balāsim (1973- ), in Finland from 2004; his film work was done under the name Ouazad Osman. His short fiction has been assembled in at least three collections beginning with The Madman of Freedom Square (trans Jonathan Wright, coll 2008), almost all of his work dealing with the surrealistic tortures inflicted upon his native land since the British invasion of 1914, often as filtered through the diaspora ...
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 ...