SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 17 February 2026
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 16 February 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Rabelais, François
(?1483/1494-1553) French monk, doctor, priest and author. The various titles now generally gathered together as Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-1552 plus a posthumous text of dubious authenticity 1564) were initially published as separate volumes [see Checklist for individual titles plus the translations of same by Sir Thomas Urquhart – first two books 1653, third book 1693 – and Peter Anthony Motteux – fourth and fifth books 1694]. ...
Peyton, Audrey
(? - ) UK author of Ashes (1981), a dark sf tale for Robert Hale Limited which is set in an obscurely described world devastated by Climate Change. [JC]
Larson, Ellen
(1953- ) US editor and author whose debut novel The Hatch and Brood of Time (1999) is a nonfantastic mystery not listed below. Her first sf novel, The Measure of the Universe (2002), follows the eventually romantic interactions of a human and a visiting Alien archaeologist who meet on a Greek Island during the course of his attempts to recover for his species the literal art of writing (see ...
Victoire, Camila
(? - ) Canadian author, in Australia for a considerable period, currently resident in Canada. Her first novel, the Young Adult Blood Circus (2023), depicts the distant Near Future presence of a new species of humanoid, which may save or terminate Homo sapiens after centuries of planetary devastation caused by global warming (see ...
Atomic Platters
The name – coined by Bill Geerhart at the Conelrad website [see links below] – for a short-lived sub-genre of 1940s and 1950s pop music concerned with an atomic World War Three and its aftermath (see Holocaust). Many, though not all, of the artists and songs that might be so classified fell into later obscurity, but this was in its day a fairly lively aural manifestation of the fascinations of ...
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 ...