SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 9 July 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.
Site updated on 7 July 2025
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Earth vs the Spider
Film (1958; vt The Spider). American International Pictures. Produced and directed by Bert I Gordon. Written by László Görög and George Worthing Yates from an original story by Gordon. Cast includes Ed Kemmer, June Kenney, Eugene Persson (credited as Gene Persson) and Gene Roth. 73 minutes. Black and white. / As the film starts Jack Flynn (Merritt Stone), father of ...
Gotlieb, Phyllis
(1926-2009) Canadian author who may be best known for her Poetry, some of which – such as the long performable poems assembled in Doctor Umlaut's Earthly Kingdom (coll 1974) – is strongly fantastic. She took an MA with the University of Toronto in English language and literature, and married a professor of computer science, whom she credited for assistance on her second sf novel. She began publishing sf with "A Grain of Manhood" in ...
Wheeler, Scott
Nickname and working name of Donald Wheeler (1937-2016), US author whose Matters of Form (1987) depicts the long campaign of a group of Aliens, stranded on Earth in the twentieth century, to Uplift human civilization to a level at which interstellar Space Flight is possible. Later sections of the book, introducing a second (and evil) alien race, are less effective. [JC]
Nolane, Richard D
Pseudonym of French author, editor and Comics writer Olivier Raynaud (1955- ), who began to publish work of genre interest in 1977 and whose first English-language publication was as the editor for DAW Books of Terra SF: The Year's Best European SF (anth 1981), a useful anthology of Western European sf in translation. This was followed by Terra SF II: The Year's Best European SF (anth ...
MacKinlay, Sterling
(1876-1952) UK author whose Near Future sf novel, Reparation (1928), is a contribution to the prolonged debate about the treatment of defeated Germany after World War One; reparations begin in 1993. [JC]
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 ...