SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 29 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 25 September 2023
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Pape, Gordon
(1936- ) US-born journalist author, in Canada from 1950; his sf novel, Chain Reaction (1978) with Tony Aspler, concern the Near Future assassination of a Canadian politician that threatens World War Three. [JC]
Percival, Dr
Pseudonym or working name of C Percival (? -? ), author of The Flaming Sword: Being an Account of the Extraordinary Adventures and Discoveries of Dr Percival in the Wilds of Africa, Written by Himself (1894), a Lost World tale in which the narrator, who is not quick witted, discovers and combats mammoths and other creatures typical of Prehistoric SF, working out finally that he ...
Kinsella, W P
(1935-2016) Canadian author whose first stories, assembled as Dance Me Outside (coll 1977) and Scars (coll 1978), deal with Native Canadians, centring on the figure of Silas Ermineskin. He remains best known, however, for his Baseball tales, several examples of which are discussed in that entry; these can be found in such collections as The Thrill of the Grass (coll 1984), The Alligator Report (coll ...
Hard SF
Item of sf Terminology coined by P Schuyler Miller in Astounding (November 1957) and since then widely used by sf Fandom and readers; it has sometimes overlapped in meaning with "hardcore sf", often used in the 1960s and 1970s to mean the kind of sf that repeats the themes and (to a degree) the style of the Genre SF written during the so-called ...
Moon, Elizabeth
(1945- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "ABCs in Zero-G" in Analog for August 1986, a polished high-tech tale assembled, with other sf and Fantasy, in Lunar Activity (coll 1990) – the title is a play on Moon's name rather than an accurate description of the book's contents. For the first decade of her career she primarily wrote military fantasy, most significantly the ...
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 ...