SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 9 June 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 8 June 2026
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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Kinder, Stephen
(1857-1917) US railwayman and author of Dutch descent. In his sf novel, The Sabertooth: A Romance of Put-In-Bay (1902), a Wandering Jew-like survivor from the last Ice age – his Immortality seemingly caused both by the Cryogenic effect of the ice, and by his wife's curse – haunts Underground caverns beneath the eponymous ...
Orb, The
UK electronic music act, founded by Alex Paterson (1959- ) and Jimmy Cauty (1956- ) and at present (after various personnel changes) comprising Paterson and Swizz-born Thomas Fehlmann (1958- ). The Orb's atmospheric, often playfully evocative, ambient music takes much of its inspiration from science fiction. Their first, and best, album was The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld (1991), which maps out its ...
Scott, Gavin
(1950- ) UK screenwriter and author, whose several novelizations of the film Small Soldiers (1998) (see Toys in SF) for the Young Adult and younger children markets include Small Soldiers (1998), Small Soldiers: The Gorgonites' s Quest (1998) and Small Soldiers: Top Secret Dossier (1998). The underlying premise of the film is that advanced ...
Money
Love of money, being the root of all evil, has always played a leading part in literature, and sf is no exception: few plots could move without it. Precisely because it is so basic, however, speculative thought has rarely focused on it; it is one of those things that is habitually taken for granted. Money may change its form, and the dollar may be replaced by the Credit, but its centrality in human affairs is inviolable. / The commonest of all wish-fulfilment ...
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 ...