SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 10 April 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 6 April 2026
Sponsor of the day: David Cowhig
Zone
Within the fictional worlds of sf stories or novels, whenever a space of some unusual properties is found, it can be defined as the zone. A zone's most characteristic feature is the way it differs from and interacts with the world around it. Sf most frequently depicts realities dissimilar to or even distant from that of readers' empirical experience, but no matter how surprising they seem, they are customarily based on a set of irrefutable yet decodable rules to be concretized in the course of ...
Scott, G Firth
(circa 1862-1935) Scottish journalist and author, in Australia from the 1880s until sometime before World War One, then in England. Most of his fiction is nonfantastic, though he remains best-known for The Last Lemurian: A Westralian Romance (Christmas 1896 The Golden Penny Magazine as "Tor Ymmot, Queen of Lemuria"; exp 1898), a Lost Race tale whose explorer protagonist discovers the Underground remains ...
Triple A
Item of Terminology relating to Videogames. Triple A or AAA titles are games released by mainstream developers at the top end of the gaming market. They are highly developed in terms of graphical capability, gameplay and design, and are expected to sell well. Game development companies spend large amounts of time, resources and marketing on these titles, which are often used as flagship titles for their companies and teams. AAA ...
Griot Galaxy
US jazz band formed in Detroit in 1972 by saxophonist, poet and music theorist Faruq Z Bey (1942-2012), whose birth name was Jesse Davis. Inspired by Sun Ra and The Art Ensemble of Chicago, their African-inspired stage make-up and costumes, as well as the cosmic reach of the music, led to their frequently being billed as "The Sci-Fi Band". They were distinguished from other free jazz outfits by their metrically complex compositions and propulsive rhythmic force. Most ...
McIntyre, Vonda N
(1948-2019) US author and geneticist, one of the earliest successful graduates of the Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop, which she attended in 1970. She began to publish work of genre interest with "Breaking Point" in Venture for February 1970, and gained prominence with "Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand" (October 1973 Analog), which won a ...
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 ...