SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 16 March 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 9 March 2026
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Spooner, Meagan
(1985- ) US author much of whose work has been in collaboration with Amie Kaufman, her three Young Adult series comprising the bulk of her work. Her first series, which is solo, the Skylark sequence beginning with Skylark (2012), is set Equipoisally in a domed Dystopian Keep surrounded by a ...
Charlton Comics
Charlton Comics was the primary Comics imprint of Charlton Publications, founded in 1946 in Derby, Connecticut, by Joe Santangelo Sr and attorney Ed Levy. Charlton Publications published a wide variety of assorted magazines and, briefly, the Monarch paperback imprint which published some sf. Charlton Comics was notoriously the lowest-paying US comics publisher, and would often acquire material and titles from defunct publishers – obtaining, for example, a great ...
Miller, George
(1945- ) Australian film-maker (his Greek parents changed their name from Miliotis soon after his birth). After a satirical short film, A History of Violence in the Cinema, Part One (1975), Miller made an international impact with Mad Max (1979), a Near-Future cop/vigilante car-chase movie that introduced Mel Gibson to stardom as a leather-clad highway patrolman in an anarchic ...
Theatre
Sf literature and theatre have much in common, as both rely heavily on the audience's imagination, yet the two forms have rarely been combined in a significant dramatic work. The principal reason seems to be a widely held assumption that the theatre, with its physical limitations, cannot plausibly present the fantastic vistas which sf writers envision. "Writing an sf play is a bit like trying to picture infinity in a cigar box," Roger Elwood declared in his ...
Jepson, Selwyn
(1899-1989) UK screenwriter and author, son of Edgar Jepson, uncle of Fay Weldon, in active service during World War One. Most of his novels are mysteries, though The Death Gong: A Chivalrous Outburst (1927) is a Tale of Circulation in which the eponymous gong, in its travels from the Orient into Occidental lands, has a fatal ...
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 ...