SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 9 June 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 8 June 2026
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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Taylor, Robert Lewis
(1912-1998) US author, often of Humour, best known for the nonfantastic The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (1959), which won a Pulitzer Price; in his sf novel, Adrift in a Boneyard (1947), the few survivors of a mysterious Disaster come, after long travel through the ruins of New York in the mode of the Last Man tale, to a peaceful ...
Captain Rocket
US Comic (1951). One issue. P L Publishing Co, Inc. Artists unknown. / Captain Rocket "with his vast storehouse of scientific and technical knowledge, is the last hope of Earth's governing councils when things go wrong." In "The Graveyard of the Rocketeers" a paralysed navigator is the only survivor of the latest stolen space-cruiser, but Captain Rocket's mind reading device and thought projection screen enables the navigator to show his winning a ...
Bramwell, James
(1911-1995) UK playwright, teacher and author, who also wrote as by James Byrom; his Utopia, Going West (1935), is set on a Mediterranean Island newly created by a deity disgruntled with humanity's record and prospects; the story, uneasily Equipoised between genres, ends in disaster, and the Brave New World – William Shakespeare's The Tempest ...
Mad Scientist
Although the Cliché of Mad Scientist as Villain is most familiar from sf in Pulp magazines and Comics, the notion that powerful minds are likely to become dangerously overheated is far older than sf. According to the Roman philosopher and playwright Seneca the Younger (circa 4 BCE-65 CE), "nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae fuit" ...
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 ...