SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 15 August 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 10 August 2026
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Crowley, John
(1942-2026) US teacher and author who also worked in documentary films and television for some time beginning in 1966. His sf novels have had a considerable impact on the field, and his fantasies established him as a figure whose work courteously but deeply stretched the boundaries of genre literature. / His first novel, The Deep (1975), is set on a flat discworld resting on a pillar that extends beyond measurement into the circumambient galactic Deep, in which very few stars ...
Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons
UK tv series (1967-1968). A Century 21 Production for ITC. Created by Gerry Anderson and Sylvia Anderson. Produced by Reg Hill. Script editor Tony Barwick. Writers included Barwick (most episodes), Shane Rimmer. Directors included Brian Burgess, Ken Turner, Alan Perry, Bob Lynn. One season, 32 25-minute episodes. Colour. / This was the fifth sf television series made by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson in ...
Mogridge, Stephen
(1915-1986) UK author of tales, usually in series, for children and Juvenile Series markets, who also wrote as by Jill Stevens, publishing in all over thirty titles in the 1950s and early 1960s. He is best known for the nonfantastic New Forest sequence; of sf interest is the Peter sequence, beginning with Peter and the Flying Saucers (1954) and ending with Peter's Denmark Adventure (1958). The sequence is undemanding, ...
Lewis, C S
(1898-1963) UK author and critic, born in Belfast; he saw active service in the trenches during World War One; he was a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, 1925-1954, and finally Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge. His very early works – Dymer (1926 chap) as by Clive Hamilton, a highly metaphysical Utopian fantasy couched as a book-length narrative poem – came before his conversion ...
Winterbotham, Russ
(1904-1971) US newspaperman and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "The Star that Would not Behave" in Astounding for August 1935, and was a prolific contributor of Genre SF in the magazine before World War Two, becoming inactive in that sphere until the 1950s, when he again began to publish serviceable fiction. For a period in the 1940s, he created several tales for the Whitman Publishing Company (generator of 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 ...