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. ...
Green, Sharon
(1942-2022) US author who came to notice for two almost simultaneous sequences of sadomasochistic novels in the manner of John Norman, with which the advertising copy explicitly linked them: the Jalav/Amazon Warrior sequence, beginning with The Crystals of Mida (1982) and ending with To Battle the Gods (1986), which is set in a fabulated Amazon; and the Terrilian Sequence, beginning with The Warrior Within ...
Stephens, Ann Sophia
(1810-1886) American author, who sometimes wrote as Mrs Ann S Stephens, and whose Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter (February-April 1839 Ladies' Companion; 1860), was Number One in the Beadle's Dime Novels series, and was therefore the first dime novel (see Dime Novel SF). Also printed in that series, Mahaska: The Indian Princess: A Tale of the Six Nations (1863) and its sequel The Indian Queen ...
Jorgensen, Ivar
Floating Pseudonym – also spelled or misspelled Ivar Jorgenson – first used in the Ziff-Davis magazines Amazing Stories and Fantastic, subsequently used in If, Imagination and Imaginative Tales. Its main user was Paul W Fairman (whom see ...
TARDIS
The well-known Time Machine in the television series Doctor Who; this device can also travel through interplanetary and interstellar space. Its "chameleon circuit" disguised it as an old-fashioned, dark-blue UK police telephone box prior to the first Doctor Who storyline and then (with rare later exceptions) ceased to function. As indicated by the capitals, the name is a somewhat ad-hoc acronym standing for Time And ...
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 ...