SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 12 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.
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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 ...
Monster from the Ocean Floor
Film (1954; vt Monster Maker). Palo Alto Productions/Lippert Pictures. Produced by Roger Corman. Directed by Wyatt Ordung. Written by Bill Danch (credited as William Danch). Cast includes Jonathan Haze (credited as Jack Hayes), Anne Kimbell, Ordung, Dick Pinner and Stuart Wade. 64 minutes. Black and white. / American artist Julie Blair (Kimbell), on vacationing at a Mexican seaside resort, hears stories of disappearances and killings blamed on ...
Ingram, Kenneth
(1882-1965) UK barrister, lay theologian, and author of some novels in the field of the fantastic, including Midsummer Sanity (1933), in which Faerie [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] and mortal Earth intersect at the summer solstice, at which point the denizens of the former convey wisdom to the denizens of the latter. Three novels are of sf interest. In The Symbolic Island: A Novel ...
Fallout
Videogame (1997). Black Isle Studios (BIS). Designed by Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky, Christopher Taylor. Platforms: DOS, Mac, Win. / Fallout is a Computer Role Playing Game which uses an Isometric three-dimensional perspective, set – as was its most important influence, Wasteland (1998) – in the ruins of a ...
Xtro
Film (1982). Ashley Productions/Amalgamated Film Enterprises. Directed by Harry Bromley Davenport. Written by Iain Cassie, Robert Smith, based on a screenplay by Michel Parry, Davenport. Cast includes Danny Brainin, Maryam d'Abo, Simon Nash, Philip Sayer and Bernice Stegers. 86 minutes. Colour. / UK sf/Horror exploitation movie in which a man, Sam Phillips (Sayer), is kidnapped by a UFO. Three ...
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 ...