SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 10 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: The Telluride Institute
Return of the Ape Man
US film (1944). Banner Productions. Directed by Philip Rosen. Written by Robert Charles. Cast includes Ernie Adams, Michael Ames, John Carradine, Mary Currier, Judith Gibson, Bela Lugosi, Frank Moran and George Zucco. Zucco, playing the ape man, fell ill during shooting and was replaced by Moran for most of the film. 60 minutes. Black and white. / A newspaper reports the disappearance of local tramp Willie the Weasel (Adams), last seen being driven ...
Hickson, Ella
(1985- ) UK playwright whose Wendy & Peter Pan (performed 10 December 2013; 2014) is a Feminist restructuring of J M Barrie's version of the title characters, mostly adapting his Peter and Wendy (1911) [for J M Barrie see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. Of more direct sf interest is Oil (performed 7 October 2016; 2016), ...
Hoffmann, Curtis H
(1956- ) US author of Project: Millennium (1987), a tale told within a Space Opera frame, as it is set on a distant world (Muspell's Planet) run by Computers for the benefit of a jaded populace; but which focuses on another planet which the Muspell AIs have populated with battalions of Heroes out of Earth's past, both mythic and historical, and ...
Erikson, Steven
Pseudonym of Canadian archaeologist, anthropologist (no longer active in either profession) and author Steve Rune Lundin (1959- ), whose first books, published under his own name, were mostly nonfantastic, beginning with A Ruin of Feathers (coll of linked stories 1991); the title story of Revolvo and Other Canadian Tales (coll 1998; rev vt including title story only Revolvo 2008 chap as by Steven Erikson) is a ...
Satire
From the earliest days of Proto SF, satire was its prevailing mode, and this inheritance was evident even after sf proper began in the nineteenth century. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines satire as literary work "in which prevailing vices or follies are held up to ridicule". Proto sf is seldom interested in imagining the societies of other worlds or future times for their own sake; most proto sf of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (by, ...
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 ...