SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 16 January 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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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Olukotun, Deji Bryce
(? - ) US lawyer and author whose first novel, Everyone Comes from Belterra: When America Owned the Amazon (2009) as Deji Olukotun, is a nonfantastic tale about the rubber industry set in Brazil. The first volume of Nigerians in Space sequence comprising Nigerians in Space (2014) and After the Flare (2017) is also essentially nonfantastic, though it revolves around an attempt to persuade expatriate Nigerian ...
Whedon, Joss
(1964- ) US filmmaker, who has also worked to particular impact in television and comics. His father and grandfather had both worked as screenwriters and lyricists, and two brothers and a sister-in-law followed him into the business, often as his co-writers. His first writing jobs were in television, where he wrote episodes for the third season of Roseanne (1989-90) and for the short-lived television version of Parenthood (1990). His first ...
El Akkad, Omar
(1982- ) Egyptian-born journalist and author, raised in Qatar, in Canada from the age of sixteen. His first novel, American War (2017), which is set in a Near Future Dystopian America ravaged by Climate Change and right-wing fundamentalism, distinguishes itself from thematic banality through its exceedingly vivid enactments of the costs of ...
bes shahar, eluki
(1956- ) US author whose real name may be Eluki Besshahar but who inscribes her working name as eluki bes shahar; she increasingly writes under the pseudonym Rosemary Edghill (Edghill being her mother's maiden name). She began publishing work of genre interest as bes shahar with "Casablanca" for Hydrospanner Zero in 1981; the tale became part of her first novel, Hellflower (fixup 1991), which begins the Butterfly St Cyr sequence about a female ...
Lucas, George
(1944- ) US film-maker. He attended the University of Southern California Film School and as a graduate student made an sf short there entitled THX 1138:4EB (1967), which won film festival awards. Working in 1968 as an assistant to Francis Ford Coppola he made a highly praised documentary about the filming of Coppola's The Rain People (1969); then in 1969, with Coppola as executive producer, Lucas began a feature-film version, ...
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 ...