SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 9 June 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 8 June 2026
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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Universal Soldier
Film (1992). Carolco International. Directed by Roland Emmerich. Executive producer Mario Kassar. Written by Richard Rothstein, Christopher Leitch, Dean Devlin. Cast includes Dolph Lundgren, Jerry Orbach, Ed O'Ross, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Ally Walker. 103 minutes. Colour. / Crisply made but derivative in most of its plot turns, Universal Soldier centres on a secret military unit of Cyborgs, many reconstructed ...
Stringer, Arthur
(1874-1950) Canadian poet and author, in the US from 1898; prolific in several genres from 1894, though he concentrated on survival tales set in the northern wilderness of his native land. The Man Who Couldn't Sleep (coll 1919) and The Wolf Woman (1928) are fantasy. Of sf interest are a film tie, The Story Without a Name (1924) with Russell Holman, in which a Death Ray appears, an ...
Moers, Walter
(1957- ) German comics writer/illustrator and author, most of whose early work was in Comics, of greatest sf interest being the Adolf, die Nazisau ["Adolf, the Nazi Pig"] sequence, comprising Adolf (graph 1998) and Adolf, Teil 2 ["Adolf, Part 2"] (graph 1999), a Satirical Alternate History tale in which Hitler ...
Tregear, Edward
(1846-1931) UK-born author, surveyor and politician, in New Zealand from June 1863, where among other things he studied the Maori language and culture and became a notable social reformer. Maori scholarship informed his venture into Fantastika, Hedged with Divinities (1895), in which all males worldwide mysteriously and symptomlessly die, with a single exception in New Zealand who has been put into a healing trance 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 ...