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Monday 14 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.
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Ellinger, Geoffrey
(1904-1990) UK author of detective novels who flourished in the early 1930s; in his one title of sf interest, The Blasted Acre (1936), a business consortium gets a monopoly on radium (see Elements; Nuclear Energy), threatening the world. [JC]
Big Little Books
Compact children's book format inaugurated in late 1932 by the Whitman Publishing Company (Racine, Wisconsin) with The Adventures of Dick Tracy (graph 1932) and widely imitated by other publishers. A typical Big Little Book had a width of 3 5/8 inches and a height of 4½ inches, with 432 pages making a fat little volume 1½ inches thick (roughly 9.2 cm x 11.4 cm x 3.8cm). Every page of text was faced by a full-page captioned picture. Many ...
Matheson, Richard Christian
(1953- ) US author and (primarily) writer for film and television, and television producer. Matheson's work has been at most only fringe sf; he is not to be confused with his father, Richard Matheson, nor with his younger brother Chris Matheson (1958- ), cowriter of the witty screenplay for Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989) and its sequel ...
Overgard, William
(1926-1990) US Comics artist, screenwriter and author, active in the first capacity from around 1950; his screenplays include scripts for The Last Dinosaur (1977) and The Bermuda Depths (1978). As an author he is of sf interest for The Divide (1980), an Alternate History tale whose double ...
Berry, Rick
Working name of American artist Richard Berry (1953- ), born Richard Riley, though Berry is now his legal name; he is sometimes credited as Richard or Rich, and he also uses the pseudonym Sam Rakeland. Berry tells biographers that he left home at the age of seventeen to work for underground comics, but there seems to be no information linking his name to specific titles. The self-trained Berry then developed an interest in the emerging field of digital art and eventually ...
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 ...