SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 23 September 2023
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 18 September 2023
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Szal, Jeremy
(1995- ) Australian editor, politician and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Aliens Ate My Anti-Grav Speeder" in Robot and Raygun for April 2014. Although his first novel Stormblood (2020) may accurately be described as Military SF set in an interstellar Space Opera venue, the heart of the tale revolves more intimately around the protagonist and his companions' ...
Gonzales, Laurence
(1947- ) US author, mostly of nonfiction, including Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why (2003). He is of sf interest for Lucy (2010), an Apes as Human tale whose protagonist discovers after he has adopted the child of a dead colleague in Africa that she is the result of a Eugenic experiment in Genetic Engineering, and that she is ...
Lemaître, Jules
(1853-1914) French dramatist, critic and author whose Les Rois (1893; trans Belle M Sherman as Prince Hermann Regent 1893; new trans Ernest Tristan and G F Monkshood Their Majesties the Kings 1909) is a Near Future tale set in 1900 in the Ruritanian kingdom of Alfaine, the story detailing an increasingly melancholy sequence of abdications that climaxes in a revolution. [JC]
Waller, Leslie
(1923-2007) US author, also resident in Italy and London, who wrote a number of bestsellers and the novelization of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977): Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), published as by Steven Spielberg. He is sometimes credited as co-inventor of the Graphic Novel in America, with the non-sf "picture novel" ...
Aelita Award
In its heyday the most prestigious Russian sf award, founded in 1981 by the Russian Federation Writers' Union and Ural'skii sledopyt ["Urals Pathfinder"] magazine. The latter was published from the city of Ekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk until 1991), and this the ceremony was held there as part of the annual Aelita Convention. The winner is chosen by a panel of judges. The Aelita was instituted as an award for the best single sf work ...
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 ...