SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 6 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.
Site updated on 5 October 2026
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Palwick, Susan
(1961- ) US academic, Professor Emerita at the University of Nevada since 2017, and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "The Woman Who Saved the World" in Asimov's for May 1985, and who has since published short fiction regularly, much of this output being assembled in The Fate of Mice (coll 2007). Her second collection, All Worlds Are Real: Short Fictions (coll 2019), contains work ranging from ...
Smith, George H
(1922-1996) US author of much popular fiction and considerable sf, under his own name and several pseudonyms including books as by Ross Camra, Jan Hudson, Jerry Jason, Jan Smith, George Hudson Smith, Diana Summers (not sf), Hal Stryker, Roy Warren and – mostly with his wife M Jane Deer – M J Deer. He began publishing sf with "The Last Spring" for Startling Stories in 1953, and became very active after about 1960, releasing his first sf novels ...
Flame, The
US Comic (1940-1942). Fox Publications, Inc. 8 issues. Artists include Arturo Cazeneuve, Lou Fine, George Tuska and Chuck Winter. Scriptwriters include Will Eisner and Nathaniel Nitkin. 68 pages, with 6-7 long strips per issue, plus a short text story. / The titular Superhero The Flame had originally appeared in Fox Publications' ...
Monáe, Janelle
Working name of US singer-songwriter, actor and author Janelle Monáe Robinson (1985- ), active from around 2003; the imagery of her music sometimes suggests realms of Fantastika (see SF Music). She is of sf interest for The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer (coll 2022), a collection (or perhaps anthology) of tales, each based on her music and written with a different ...
McGuffin
A term devised by Alfred Hitchcock, who describes it at considerable length in François Truffaut's Le Cinéma Selon Hitchcock (1966; trans Helen G Scott as Hitchcock 1967), as an object whose loss – or rumours of whose existence – triggers the cast of a thriller or detective film into searching for it, or fighting for it, or running from it, but which has in fact little or no intrinsic meaning once the ...
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 ...