SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 11 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.
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Hicks, Granville
(1901-1982) US author, editor and broadcaster, most of whose significant work lay in the field of cultural studies, initially from a Communist standpoint; although by 1939 he had become disillusioned with Soviet communism, he retained a Marxist orientation in his work. His first novel, The First to Awaken (1940) with Richard M Bennett – Bennett illustrated the book and provided ideas, but did not collaborate in the writing – was a ...
Kerruish, Jessie Douglas
(1884-1949) UK author, initially of romances with fantasy elements [see also The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below], and also of numerous short stories from around 1910, several of them assembled later as Babylonian Nights' Entertainment: A Selection of Narratives from the Text of Certain Undiscovered Cuneiform Tablets (coll 1934). Of some sf interest is her Werewolf tale, ...
White, James
(1928-1999) UK author from Ulster who initially worked for various Belfast tailoring firms, as assistant manager of a department store, and from 1965 in various capacities for an aircraft company, ultimately as publicity officer 1968-1984; this mixed occupational experience is reflected in several of his works. His visible involvement with Fandom began with Slant (1948-1953); his articles appeared in many other ...
Innes, Hammond
(1913-1998) UK journalist and author of adventure novels, who wrote nonfantastic children's adventure tales as by Ralph Hammond. His earliest work was exclusively devoted to the Peter Deveril sequence of thrillers beginning with the nonfantastic The Doppelganger (1936), featuring a newspaper reporter and criminologist whose investigations sometimes hover at the edge of the fantastic through Inventions involving improbable ...
Riou, Édouard
(1833-1900) French artist and illustrator, a student of Gustave Doré; he is best known for illustrating several early instalments of Jules Verne's Voyages Extraordinaires sequence, beginning with Five Weeks in a Balloon (1865). His style, with its emphasis on outdoor scenes featuring heavily foregrounded Monsters and other creatures, stands in some contrast to the more ...
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 ...