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
Walking Dead, The
Film (1936). Warner Brothers Pictures. Produced by Louis F Edelman (uncredited). Directed by Michael Curtiz. Written by Ewart Adamson, Peter Milne, Robert Andrews, and Lillie Hayward from an original story by Adamson and Joseph Fields. Cast includes Marguerite Churchill, Ricardo Cortez, Edmund Gwen and Boris Karloff. 66 minutes. Black and white. / Down-on-his-luck pianist John Elman (Karloff) is framed for a murder by gangsters led by Nolan (Cortez). ...
Into the Ruins
US low-paying magazine available in print form, as a downloadable PDF and, latterly, as an Ebook. It was produced by Joel Caris of Figuration Press, Portland, Oregon and ran for sixteen quarterly issues, from Spring 2016 to Summer 2020. / The magazine's theme was the deindustrialization of civilization, looking at how the future might cope with Climate Change, fossil-fuel depletion, Pollution, ...
Peters, S M
(? - ) Canadian author, possibly pseudonymous, who began publishing work of genre interest with "Ticker Hounds" in On Spec for Winter 2005. Whitechapel Gods (2008) is a Steampunk tale set in an Alternate History version of Whitechapel, in east London, years after a failed revolt against the gods of the machine. Two of ...
Abre Los Ojos
Film (1997; vt Open Your Eyes). Directed by Alejandro Amenábar. Written by Amenábar & Mateo Gil. Cast includes Penélope Cruz, Chete Lera, Fele Martinez, Najwa Nimri and Eduardo Noriega. 117 minutes. Colour. / Playboy César's discarded girlfriend Nuria (Nimri) takes revenge by crashing their car, killing herself and leaves César (Noriega) facially disfigured; his unravelling life seems briefly repaired by his new love Sofía (Cruz) ...
Greenwood, Gary
(? - ) UK small-press author in whose first novel The Dreaming Pool (1998) a South Wales underachiever is threatened by ghosts, a secret society and an H P Lovecraft-style Thing; an early hint at extra-terrestrial incomers (see Aliens) leaves the true nature of events around the titular pool suitably unresolved. Greenwood's distinctive mix of sf, ...
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 ...