SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 27 January 2022
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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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Feeley, Gregory
(1955- ) US critic and author whose essays and book reviews have appeared from the 1980s in various journals from the Washington Post to Foundation. Sometimes adversarial, unfailingly intelligent, they represent a cold-eyed view of a genre he loves by a critic immersed in its material; not always justly, he has been accused of a tendency to hector. Although he began publishing sf with "The Light at the End of the Penumbra" in Ascents of Wonder (anth 1977) edited by David ...
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins
(1860-1935) US editor, author and lecturer, and an important figure in the history of US Feminism; partner in the 1890s of Adeline Knapp. Although by no means negligible – she published almost 200 short stories plus longer works, many of them inherently interesting – much of her later fiction was clearly shaped to promulgate a copious flow of radical thought. However, her first story, The Yellow Wall Paper (January 1892 New England Magazine; 1899 chap) as by Charlotte Perkins ...
Swan American Magazine
UK slim Pulp magazine, published by G G Swan, London. The two (undated) sf issues in the series, #11 (probably 1948) and #15 (probably 1949), were resettings with UK illustrations of parts of Future Fantasy and Science Fiction (a variant title of Future Fiction), December 1942, and of Science Fiction Quarterly, Winter 1942. This was effectively a postwar renewal, with new numbering, of the earlier Swan Yankee Magazine series. [FHP] links / Galactic Central illustrated checklist
Kadohata, Cynthia
(1956- ) US author who has focused primarily on Young Adult fiction, most of it nonfantastic. Of sf interest is In the Heart of the Valley of Love (1992), set in a Near Future Los Angeles, which has by 2052 become an impoverished, ill-governed, hardscrabble. Dystopian enclave. The protagonist, unusually for an sf novel set in California, is Japanese-American, and must survive in a world where race discrimination (see Race in SF) has intensified. The Glass Mountains (1995) ...
Zappa, Frank
(1940-1993) US composer, singer and guitarist. Of Zappa's seventy-five albums (many credited to "Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention") some include references to Pulp-magazine heroics and monstrosities that are recognizably sf. Zappa was always happiest juxtaposing avant-garde classical, experimental, chart-pop and popular culture more generally, as in his extended jazz-fusion "King Kong" (on Uncle Meat, 1969), a version, obviously, of King Kong. Joe's Garage (1978) is a sprawling rock ...
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 ...