SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 13 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: Conversation 2023
Cummings, Ray
Working name of US author Raymond King Cummings (1887-1957), writer of over 600 identified stories under various names in various genres, about 350 of them between 1935 and 1942; it is estimated he probably wrote at least 750 tales in all. He was one of the few writers active during the heyday of US Pulp-magazine sf (1930-1950) to have begun his career before Hugo Gernsback launched Amazing in 1926. One of ...
Master Mystery, The
US silent Serial Film (1918-1919). Rolfe Photoplays. Directed by Harry Grossman and Burton L King. Written by Arthur B Reeve and Charles Logue. Cast includes Floyd Buckley, Jack Burns, Charles E Graham, Harry Houdini, Marguerite Marsh, William Pike and Ruth Stonehouse. 15 episodes; total runtime 238 minutes. Black and white. / International Patents Inc obtains the sole rights to ...
Asprin, Robert Lynn
(1946-2008) US author who began publishing sf with his first novel, The Cold Cash War (1977), which alarmingly conflates Game-World antics (like fake Wars between mercenaries representing rival corporations on rented turf – Brazil, for instance, being visualized mainly as an arena for world-dominating firms to play games in) and a political rationale to legitimize the corporate control of Earth. Asprin's later novels ...
Johnstone, D Lawson
(1869-1905) Scottish author who published all his well-regarded fiction, mostly Young Adult novels, between 1888 and the turn of the century. His first work of sf interest is The Mountain Kingdom: A Narrative of Adventure (1888), a Jules Verne-style Lost-World tale whose young protagonists travel into Kisnia, the Kingdom of the Smoking Mountains (in Tibet), which is inhabited by ...
Pyper, Andrew
(1968-2025) Canadian author, active from the mid-1990s, who also wrote as by Mason Coile; almost all his work, beginning with Kiss Me (coll 1996) and the successful Lost Girls (1999), was supernatural horror [not listed below]. He is of sf interest for William (2024) as by Mason Coile, whose claustrophobic protagonist spends his time in isolation creating a Robot named William whose resemblance to ...
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 ...