SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 14 May 2026
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 11 May 2026
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Suzuki Kōji
(1957-2026) Japanese author and essayist, largely known in English through the Cinema adaptations of several of his books, the international success of which obscured his wide-ranging domestic output. His horror and Equipoisal fiction proceeded in tandem with a wide array (not listed here) of books on young fatherhood and occasional works on motorcycle travel. He was also the translator of Simon Brett's ...
Montague, Charles Howard
(1858-1889) US editor, journalist and author whose Two Strokes of the Bell: A Strange Story (1886) deals melodramatically with Amnesia in a supernatural frame. Of more sf interest is The Doctor's Mistake: Or What Myrta Saw: An Experiment with a Life (1888) with Clement Milton Hammond, where a complexly melodramatic plot – at least one Reincarnation seems to ...
Roberts, Michèle
(1949- ) UK poet and author, poetry editor of Spare Rib 1975-1977. Her novels all tend to Fabulation in their expression of an articulate Feminist aesthetic, but three are of genre interest. The Wild Girl (1984) vigorously displaces the reminiscences of Mary Magdalene into what Christians might deem an unattractive Alternate History in which she and Jesus ...
Captain Video
1. US tv serial (1949-1953 and 1955-1956). DuMont. Produced by Larry Menkin. DuMont was a New York television company; in the early years of television many programmes came from New York. Captain Video, a 30-minute children's programme that went out five nights a week, was the first sf on television. Written by Maurice Brockhauser, it starred Richard Coogan (replaced in 1950 by Al Hodge) as Captain Video, who 300 years from now, with the aid of his Video Rangers, battled various ...
ESP
An acronym for extra-sensory perception which was popularized by the pioneering exercise in parapsychology, Extra-Sensory Perception (1934) by J B Rhine, which attempted to repackage folkloristic notions of "second sight" or a "sixth sense" in scientific jargon; he is referred to in Psychoanalysis and the Occult (anth 1953) edited by George Devereux, where "occult" is understood primarily in terms of ...
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 ...