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.
Site updated on 19 May 2025
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Gilchrist, Rosetta Luce
(1850-1921) US medical doctor and author of Tibby: A Novel Dealing with Psychic Forces and Telepathy (1904), in which Telepathy is used for Communication with a land beyond which seems to resemble a Utopia. [JC]
Dobozy, Tamas
(1969- ) Canadian academic and author, active in the latter capacity from the mid 1990s; his work, mostly short stories, ranges through the jostling venn-diagram intersections of genres typical of modern Fantastika, beginning with his first collection, When X Equals MaryLou (coll 1995), and proceeding consistently, without any radical evolution, to Ghost Geographies: Fictions (coll 2021). Siege 13: Stories ...
Fox, Gardner F
(1911-1986) US lawyer and author, who began writing in 1937 for DC Comics, including Superman. Arguably his most important work was for Comics: though it is claimed that he published at least 160 books under various names – not all are given here; some are Westerns with fantastic elements – this total pales beside his 4000 or more comic-book stories, also ...
Xu Zhuodai
Pen-name of Xu Fulin (1880-circa 1958), who flourished as a humorist during the 1920s in the cosmopolitan Chinese city of Shanghai, gaining the sobriquet Huaji Dafu ["The Master of Laughter"]. Among his other professions, he ran a school for acrobats, was a sometime playwright and translator, dabbled in the nascent film business, and even set up a soy sauce factory. / Among his many works of film reviews, essays and short stories, Yingxixue ...
Shattuck, William
(1864-1946) US author of The Keeper of the Salamander's Order: A Tale of Strange Adventure in Unknown Climes (1895), a Fantastic Voyage story whose protagonist, accompanied by demons and other creatures, visits strange lands and Islands, encountering at least one Lost Race en route. The author handles much of this material with an unsubtle Satirical brush. ...
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 ...