SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 11 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.
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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 ...
Scientists
Scientists in pre-twentieth-century sf often exhibited symptoms of social maladjustment, sometimes to the point of insanity; they were characteristically obsessive and antisocial. Some scientists were quasidiabolical figures, like Coppelius in E T A Hoffmann's "Der Sandmann" ["The Sandman"] (comprising volume one of Nachtstücke, 1816) or Mary Shelley's eponymous ...
Rolt-Wheeler, Francis W
Working name of UK author Francis William Wheeler (1876-1960), in US and Canada circa 1900-1925, later in Tunis and Nice; in his early career he specialized in stories for boys, though in his later years – after a spectacular 1915 divorce which led to his imprisonment – he turned to the kind of religious investigation, including forays into Theosophy, that characterized the career of his sister, Ethel Rolt Wheeler (1869-1958) (both siblings added ...
Frame, Janet
(1924-2004) New Zealand author, best known for her non-fantastic work; some of her stories – especially those assembled in Snowman, Snowman: Fables and Fantasies (coll 1963) and You Are Now Entering the Human Heart (coll 1983) – are fantasy. The most intense of her several novels explore the world through the telling Perceptions of protagonists categorized as psychiatrically disturbed, situations frequently described in ...
Williams, Islwyn
(1915-1988) Welsh author who produced two sf novels remembered longer in Italy than in the UK. Dangerous Waters (1952) showed British World War Two heroes defending the realm against a new enemy from Under the Sea off Pembrokeshire, and was one of the better 1950s green-skinned-invader yarns (admittedly, the competition included Kathleen Lindsay's sf as by Nigel Mackenzie). ...
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 ...