SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 18 February 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 17 February 2025
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Moore, Chris
(1947-2025) Prolific UK artist, known to the public primarily for his hard-edged treatment of Hard SF subjects, although in fact he produced covers in different styles for all sorts of other genres as well, including illustrations of record sleeves for artists as diverse as Rod Stewart, Fleetwood Mac, Status Quo and Pentangle. What impressed most about Moore's sf art was not just the photographic realism but the sense of scale, achieved largely through a ...
Cheynell, Francis
(1608-1665) UK minister, controversialist from a Presbyterian point of view, and author; his Proto SF Satire, Aulicus His Dream, of the Kings Sudden Comming to London (1644 chap), is one of the first texts in English to be set, even notionally, in the future. The pamphlet complicatedly attacks the Royalist newspaper, Mercurius Aulicus, issues of which were routinely smuggled into London, ...
Sherl, Gregory
(? - ) US poet and author whose first novel, The Future for Curious People (2014) with Julianna Baggott (uncredited), is set in a Near Future America where limited Time Viewer access to the future is possible through complex processing that goes essentially unexplained. Time viewing is governmentally restricted to previews of the viewer's ...
Sterling, George
(1869-1926) US poet and author whose reputation peaked during the first decade of the twentieth century, partly due to the fervent advocacy of Ambrose Bierce and Jack London; he is now almost entirely forgotten. The title poem of The Testimony of the Suns and Other Poems (coll 1903) is an extended essay in Cosmology whose relegation of Homo sapiens to utter insignificance ...
Kurtén, Björn
(1924-1988) Finnish palaeontologist and author whose fiction appeared first in his native Swedish, his first novel of potential sf interest being published as early as 1941. His sf novels – Den svarta tigern (1978 Sweden; trans Kurtén as Dance of the Tiger: A Novel of the Ice Age 1980) with a foreword by Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002), and Mammutens raddare (1984 Sweden; trans Kurtén as Singletusk: A Novel of the Ice Age ...
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 ...