SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 20 May 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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New York
Great Cities may seem immemorial, but normally boast at least one named founder. Romulus and Remus founded Rome, or so the story tells us. Frankus, who was of Trojan birth, founded Paris, it is said. The Yellow Emperor, who revered the earth beneath his feet, founded Beijing 5,000 years ago. London was traditionally founded, or its founding was attended, by the giants Gog and Magog, first instanced as the single giant Gogmagog or Goemagot ...
Howard, Scott Alexander
(? - ) Canadian academic and author whose first novel, The Other Valley (2024), is shaped around what might be called a geography of Time Travel: the tale is set in three valleys, one twenty years before and one twenty years after the seemingly contemporary central valley or Zone. A governing body known as the Conseil attempts to manage the temporal dynamics ...
Captain Justice
The hero of a long-running series of boys' stories (see Boys' Papers) published in Modern Boy, a weekly magazine published by Amalgamated Press through the 1930s. The stories were written by Murray Roberts (Robert Murray Graydon) and later – following his death – by John Garbutt. Very British, Captain Justice wore white ducks, smoked cigars and worked out of Titanic ...
Griffiths, Linda Marshall
(? - ) UK playwright, some of whose earlier plays edge toward the fantastic, beginning with Pomegranate (first performed 2006); of sf interest is Villette (performed 2016; 2016 chap), in which Villette (1853) by Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855) is reconfigured into the Near Future, where the original protagonist of the tale, Lucy Snowe, is a Clone bred as a ...
Golemon, David Lynn
(1955- ) US military intelligence officer (ex) and author of the Event Group sequence of conspiracy thrillers, beginning with Event (2006) and ending with Legacy: An Event Group Thriller (2011), featuring the eponymous, highly armed (see Military SF) secret organization, which is dedicated to serving American Presidents in need. The first tale deals with UFOs; the second invokes ...
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 ...