SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 24 June 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 23 June 2025
Sponsor of the day: Stuart Hopen
Murdoch, Temple
(? -? ) UK author of fiction for boys. The eponymous Villain of Vull the Invisible! (24 November 1934-23 February 1935 Ranger; 1936 chap) uses Invisibility to do evil. [JC/RR] see also: Boys' Friend Library; Boys' Papers. /
Wilson, Robert Anton
(1932-2007) US author who remains best known for the first Illuminatus! sequence – The Eye in the Pyramid (1975), The Golden Apple (1975) and Leviathan (1975), assembled as The Illuminatus Trilogy (omni 1984) – all written with Robert J Shea. Shea did not collaborate with Wilson on Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati (1977), The Illuminati Papers ...
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The [game]
Videogame (1984). Infocom. Designed by Douglas Adams, Steve Meretzky. Platforms: AppleII, Atari8, C64, DOS, Mac (1984); AtariST (1985); Amiga, Amstrad (1986). / Hitchhiker is a text-based Adventure game, a variation on the theme established in the ...
Mendham, Clement A
(1859-1941) UK civil engineer and author of a Lost Race tale, A Buried Mystery (1898), in which an ancient settlement is discovered in South America; the protagonist lives there a while, soon finding a maiden sufficiently white to marry. [JC]
Time Travel
It is a great literary convenience to be able to move a narrative viewpoint backwards or forwards in Time, and writers have always been prepared to use whatever narrative devices come to hand for this purpose. Until the end of the nineteenth century, dreams were the favoured method – perhaps most significantly deployed in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843) and Edgar Allan ...
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 ...