SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 11 July 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 7 July 2025
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Holland, Cecelia
(1943- ) US author whose numerous historical novels, beginning with The Firedrake (1966), have explored with striking vividness many of the genuine "alternate worlds" on Earth through the radically unmundane form of the historical novel. One of these, still-born as a tale set in Mongol China, became the sf novel Floating Worlds (1976), a formidably long and complex Space Opera involving conflict in the Solar ...
Master Mystery, The
US silent Serial Film (1918-1919). Rolfe Photoplays. Directed by Harry Grossman and Burton L King. Written by Arthur B Reeve and Charles Logue. Cast includes Floyd Buckley, Jack Burns, Charles E Graham, Harry Houdini, Marguerite Marsh, William Pike and Ruth Stonehouse. 15 episodes; total runtime 238 minutes. Black and white. / International Patents Inc obtains the sole rights to ...
Aermont, Paul
Pseudonym of US businessman and author Benjamin F Field (1806-1887), whose Fantastic Voyage tale, A Narrative of the Travels and Adventures of Paul Aermont Among the Planets (1873), recounts the experience of an interplanetary tour by Balloon to Saturn (see Outer Planets), Jupiter, Mars and Venus. As ...
Short Circuit [tv]
US animated tv series (2020-2021). Walt Disney Animation Studios. Nineteen 3-5 minute episodes, Colour. / A Television Anthology Series for which Walt Disney Animation Studios' (see Disney on Television) staff were invited to pitch ideas, to "take risks, surface new and diverse storytelling voices at the Studio and experiment with new technical innovation in the film-making process". Most of the ...
Ballingrud, Nathan
(1970- ) US author, for many years exclusively of horror, much of it supernatural, almost always in the form of short stories. He began to publish work of genre interest with "Memories of Green" in Forbidden Lines for Fall 1992, with much of his work being assembled as North American Lake Monsters (coll 2013; vt Monsterland 2020) and Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell (coll 2019; exp ...
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 ...