SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 20 June 2025
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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Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Dimaline, Cherie
(1975- ) Canadian author whose Métis background has shaped her work, much of it nonfantastic, though the Young Adult Marrow Thieves sequence beginning with The Marrow Thieves (2017) is sf. In a Near Future Dystopian world afflicted by Climate Change, where most humans have lost the ability to dream, the indigenous ...
Uncanny Stories
US Pulp magazine, one issue, April 1941, published by Manvis Publications, one of the "Red Circle" magazines published by Martin Goodman; edited by Robert O Erisman. Uncanny contained both sf and weird fantasy, including "The Coming of the Giant Germs" by Ray Cummings, but nothing of importance. Erisman suitably sexed up the story titles, for example making David H Keller's innocuous "The ...
Drummond, June
(1923-2011) South African author, in London for several years in the 1950s. She wrote almost exclusively detective novels and Regency romances; one of the former, The Gantry Episode (1968; vt Murder on a Bad Trip 1968), edges into sf in its investigation of the planting of the Drug LSD in a reservoir and of the effects thereof. [JC/DRL] see also: Urban Legends. /
Science Fiction Review (Monthly), The
Digest-sized semiprofessional critical Magazine (see Semiprozine) published by Bran Dougal. Edited by Martin Last, with Baird Searles and Don Yee as associate editors. Twenty monthly issues, March 1975 to October 1976, with #17/#18 for July/August 1976 being a double issue. / The first issue was titled The Science Fiction Review and featured reviews by all 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 ...