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
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Eternity Science Fiction
US letter-size Semiprozine, which saw two series: four issues July 1972-February (undated) 1975; two undated issues Winter 1979-Spring 1980; published and edited from South Carolina by Stephen Gregg (1954-2005). Eternity Science Fiction was well produced, though the first issue still looked too non-professional. Gregg wanted to promote poetry and graphic art as well as fiction, and Eternity SF published a fair quota of verse including poetry by ...
McConnell, Frank
(1942-1999) US academic and critic, a professor of English at Northwestern University and the University of California, Santa Barbara, who wrote extensively on sf and many other subjects; his writings included a regular media column for Commonweal magazine and four detective novels, and he served four times on the committee that awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. His work in the genre included editing The Time Machine/The War of the Worlds: A Critical Edition (omni ...
Vance, Gerald
Ziff-Davis House Name (1941-1958), a personal pseudonym of William P McGivern until 1944 (though it is not certain that all Vance stories up to that date were by him); from 1948-1950 the name was used mostly by Chester S Geier, and between 1951 and 1956 it was again used several times by McGivern in Amazing and ...
Forbes, Alexander
(1882-1965) US author whose sf novel, The Radio Gunner (1924) as Anonymous, depicts a Future War set in 1937 between Northern Europe, in alliance with the USA, and the Constantinople Coalition. Forbes's predictive powers were not strong, and his eponymous hero, who knows how to locate radio equipment with his special device, fails to enthral. [JC]
Sargasso Sea
This region in the west of the North Atlantic Ocean, with Bermuda near its western edge, is named for the Sargassum seaweed that grows there and which – along with historical accounts of sailing ships being becalmed there – gave rise to the popular legend of a seaweed-choked Zone of mystery, a mist-shrouded oceanic Lost World of derelict ocean craft, very probably infested with Monsters and ...
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 ...