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.
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Straub, Peter
(1943-2022) US author who focused throughout his long career on horror novels, most of them ambitious, and almost always fantastic (see Fantastika; Horror in SF), but using very few sf agencies at any point. His collaboration with Stephen King in the Talisman sequence comprising The Talisman (1984) and Black House (2001) verges on sf, however, when its characters ...
Marshall, Helen
(1983- ) Canadian academic and author, in UK from 2014, partner of Vince Haig (who writes as Malcolm Devlin) since 2015. She began to publish poetry around 2004, and published her first work of genre interest with "Skin" in Future Lovecraft (anth 2011) edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R Stiles. Most of her work – much of which has been assembled as ...
Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, The
Film (1953). Mutual Pictures/Warner Bros. Director Eugène Lourié. Written by Lou Morheim, Fred Freiberger, based on "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" (23 June 1951 Saturday Evening Post; vt "The Fog Horn" in The Golden Apples of the Sun, coll 1953) by Ray Bradbury. Cast includes Paul Christian, Cecil Kellaway, Paula Raymond and Kenneth Tobey. 80 ...
Le Queux, William
(1864-1927) UK journalist and author (his father was French), active contributor to newspapers from the mid-1880s, and author of over 200 books in a variety of genres. Most of his most popular works were espionage thrillers in the vein of E Phillips Oppenheim – a notorious confabulator, he claimed, unconvincingly, to be a spy himself – and detective novels, often with oriental colouring, beginning with Guilty Bonds (1890), about ...
Price, Bruce Deitrick
(? - ) US artist, journalist and author, active from the early 1980s; of his various work, fiction and nonfiction, Frankie (2022) is of sf interest through its tracing of the creation of a female Android whose amiability does not fend off disaster. [JC]
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 ...