SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 16 February 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 16 February 2026
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Shadows of Saturn
US Online Magazine and Semiprozine produced by Peter Burtis, Intervale, New Hampshire which ran for just three issues, April/May to August/September 2005. The magazine was dedicated to "dark science fiction, fantasy and slipstream stories with horror elements", according to its now defunct website, and the contents of the three issues certainly emphasized the dark and fantastic. James S Dorr's "City on Fire" (April/May 2005) ...
Prucher, Jeff
(1971- ) US freelance lexicographer best known for Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction (2007), the first historical dictionary of words originating in sf, plus citations and bibliographic information. Coverage includes not only the many Genre SF neologisms but critical Terminology and Fan Language. This pioneering reference book won the 2008 ...
Kelly, William Patrick
(1848-1915) Irish soldier and author, mostly in the UK, in whose Doctor Baxter's Invention (1912) it proves possible to transfer insanity and homicidal behaviour from one person to another via a serum taken from the blood of a homicidal maniac (see Identity Transfer; Medicine). The Harrington Street Mystery (1915), a detective story, features an electro-magnetic Weapon. ...
Sachdeva, Anjali
(? - ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Pleiades" in Gulf Coast for Summer/Fall 2010, the Near Future tale of an Eugenics experiment gone poignantly wrong, which was assembled in her first book, All the Names They Used for God (coll 2018). Other stories in this volume, typically climaxing with a ...
Allen, Irwin
(1916-1991) US film-maker long associated with sf subjects. He worked in radio during the 1940s; later, with the arrival of television, he created the first celebrity panel show. In 1951 he began producing films for RKO, and in 1953 won an Academy Award for The Sea Around Us, a pseudo-documentary which he wrote and directed. He then made a similar film for Warner Brothers, The Animal World (1956), which contained Dinosaur sequences animated by ...
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 ...