SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 17 October 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 12 October 2026
Sponsor of the day: Paul Giamatti
Edwards, Malcolm
(1949-2026) UK editor, critic and publisher, educated at Cambridge, where he graduated in anthropology. Active in UK sf Fandom in the 1970s and early 1980s, he published the first complete text of James Blish's "The Science in Science Fiction" (May 1951-May 1952 Science Fiction Quarterly) in his Fanzine Quicksilver #2 in 1971; edited the ...
White Holes
Item of Terminology denoting proposed cosmic counterparts of Black Holes. A series of theoretical papers in the 1970s suggested that for every black hole there must somewhere else – perhaps at the far end of a connecting Wormhole – be a corresponding white hole gushing energy out into the Universe in the same way that a black hole would suck it in. The idea was popularized by John ...
Barker, Arthur W
(? -? ) US author of The Light from Sealonia (1927), a Lost World novel set in a deep valley near the North Pole; two opposing civilizations inhabit the cleft, both boasting high Technology, Utopian Sealonia containing fair-skinned abstemious descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, Nodolia containing dark-skinned hedonists descended from Cain and his ilk ...
Abbey, Lynn
Working name of US author and editor Marilyn Lorraine Abbey (1948- ), married from 1982 to 1993 to Robert Lynn Asprin. She began to publish work of genre interest with Daughter of the Bright Moon (1979), opening the Rifkind fantasy trilogy, and in the same year contributed the novelette "The Face of Chaos" to Thieves' World (anth 1979), edited by her future husband Asprin and opening the ...
Janes, Phil
(1958- ) US author of the comic Galaxy Game sf sequence comprising The Galaxy Game (1993), Fission Impossible (1993) and I, Arnold: Round Three of the Galaxy Game (1995), featuring the adventures of the harum-scarum crew of a new Starship who discover that the galaxy is run as a Godgame by quasi-deities who play with us for their sport. The crew (which includes a ...
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 ...