SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 11 February 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 9 February 2026
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Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Sorcerers, The
Film (1967). Tigon Film Distributors (UK)/Allied Artists Pictures (US). Produced by Patrick Curtis and Tony Tenser. Directed by Michael Reeves. Written by Reeves and Tom Baker from an idea by John Burke (see Jonathan Burke). Cast includes Boris Karloff, Catherine Lacey and Ian Ogilvy. 86 minutes. Colour. / Former medical hypnotist Professor Marcus Monserrat (Karloff), disgraced by an unexplained incident some years ...
Delany, Martin R
(1812-1885) US physician, soldier, newspaper editor, author and advocate of Black rights, during a period when it was anything but safe for an African-American to speak out (though he was born free, his mother broke the law when she taught him to read and write). Success in each of his several fields of endeavour was fraught with risk, as his patent accomplishments deeply affronted white Americans; student protests caused his removal from medical studies at Harvard in 1850, with the connivance ...
Kraftwerk
Enormously influential group of German electronic musicians, formed by Ralf Hütter (1946- ) and Florian Schneider-Esleben (1947-2020) in 1970. The group achieved international fame as a quartet, with drummer Wolfgang Flür (1947- ) and Karl Bartos (1952- ), following the release of their fourth album Autobahn (1974). The 20-minute title track reproduces a car journey on its titular motorway, from the ...
Anobile, Richard J
(1947-2023) US author and editor who created a number of graphic works based on various media productions, comprising many stills from a film or Television series captioned with scripted dialogue and stage directions. A particularly valuable reference from before the videotape boom is James Whale's Frankenstein (graph 1974), with over 1000 stills captioned with the complete dialogue transcribed from the soundtrack 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 ...