SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 16 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 16 February 2026
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Ghostly Weird Stories
US Comic (1953-1954). Star Publications Inc. 5 issues (numbered #120-#124). Artists include L B Cole and Jay Disbrow. Scriptwriters include Jay Disbrow. 36 pages per issue, each having 3-4 long strips and a short text story, with up to 3 one-page strips as filler. Ghostly Weird Stories was a mixture of original stories and reprints; this entry focuses on the former. As the title suggests, supernatural Horror is common, but ...
Dane, John Colin
(? -? ) US author whose sf novel Champion (1907) is narrated by a sentient car (see Machines), which or who recounts various adventures among humans, following a tradition – begun as early as Tobias Smollett's The History and Adventures of an Atom (1769 2vols) – that generates opportunities for Satire, vicarious ...
Steffanson, Con
A House Name used by Avon Books for the initial four books of their sequence of Ties to the Flash Gordon franchise: Ron Goulart wrote the first three of these and Bruce Cassiday the fourth. Two further titles appeared as by Cassiday's own pseudonym Carson Bingham. [DRL]
Bowman, David
(1957-2012) US author whose first novel, Let the Dog Drive (1992), features gonzo Equipoisal riffs on modern American life, with elements of fantasy, Satire and Californian Magic Realism. While evoking some of the same mix of elements, his second novel, Bunny Modern (1998), is a genuine sf Satire set in New York, in a ...
Hardy, Phil
(1945-2014) UK journalist, business consultant and expert on rock music and film, on both of which subjects he has published widely, having been founding editor of Studio Vista's Rockbooks series and of the magazine Music Business. Among his notable books on film those most relevant to sf are The Aurum Film Encyclopedia: Science Fiction (1984; vt Science Fiction: The Complete Film Sourcebook 1984; vt The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Movies ...
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 ...