SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 15 August 2026
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 10 August 2026
Sponsor of the day: Paul Giamatti
Crowley, John
(1942-2026) US teacher and author who also worked in documentary films and television for some time beginning in 1966. His sf novels have had a considerable impact on the field, and his fantasies established him as a figure whose work courteously but deeply stretched the boundaries of genre literature. / His first novel, The Deep (1975), is set on a flat discworld resting on a pillar that extends beyond measurement into the circumambient galactic Deep, in which very few stars ...
Oblivion
American film (2013). Universal Pictures, Relativity Media, Monolith Pictures. Directed by Joseph Kosinski. Written by Karl Gajdusek and Michel Arndt from an unpublished Graphic Novel by Kosinski. Cast includes Tom Cruise, Morgan Freeman, Olga Kurylenko, Melissa Leo and Andrea Riseborough. 124 minutes. Colour. / In 2017, Earth at great cost beats off an Invasion from space by the Alien ...
Stawicki, Matt
Working name of American artist Matthew Stawicki (1969- ), though he is occasionally credited with his full name. After graduating from the Pennsylvania School of Art and Design in 1991, Stawicki embarked upon a career in genre art with a 1993 cover for Brad Linaweaver's Moon of Ice (March 1982 Amazing; exp 1988), an image of the Earth and Moon separated by a red bar with a ...
Kidd, Kathryn H
(1950-2015) US author of some non-fantastic comic novels set in the Mormon community and, with her husband Clark L Kidd, various nonfiction books of practical advice from a Mormon viewpoint. She collaborated with her friend Orson Scott Card on the first volume of Lovelock (1994) in the incomplete Mayflower sequence, concerning the dilemma of a monkey sufficiently educated to conceive of himself as a slave (see ...
Kyme, Nick
(? - ) UK editor and author, involved in Games journalism and other functions from 1998; his sf novels are Ties to Games Workshop Wargame universes, beginning with Necromunda: Back from the Dead (2006) and continuing with a Warhammer novel, Warhammer: Oathbreaker (2008), and several for the more heavily sf-oriented ...
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 ...