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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.
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Quiroule, Pierre
Pseudonym of UK author Walter William Sayer (1892-1982), and also a House Name of the Sexton Blake Library, to which Sayer contributed under that name; it was also used by R Coutts Armour. As Quiroule, Sayer is also credited with The Painted Death (1935), a Lost Race tale featuring Amazons deep in the South American jungle ruled by a queen ...
Saint, H F
(1941- ) US businessman and author whose sf novel, Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1987), filmed as Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992), treats the question of Invisibility as a series of problems in practical living, in direct contrast to the aspirational hubris evinced by the Antihero in H G Wells's ...
Dirac Communicator
A Imaginary-Science device invented by James Blish for the story "Beep" (February 1954 Galaxy; exp vt The Quincunx of Time 1973), and used by him also in other stories. It is an instantaneous communicator, named after the great theoretical physicist Paul Dirac (1902-1984); the Blish story contrasts it with Faster Than Light but non-instantaneous ...
X Series, The
Videogame series (from 1999). Egosoft. / The X Series is a line of Space Sims, descended from Elite (1984). The player has considerable freedom to explore, trade, mine asteroids, fight pirates (or become one), carry out missions (including bounty-hunting and passenger transport), or create a commercial empire of space-based factories and fleets of starships. The game universe itself is ...
North, Anna
(1983- ) US journalist, editor and author whose Near Future Young Adult Dystopia, America Pacifica (2011), is set refreshingly in an identifiable venue, a seemingly manufactured Island a hundred or so miles off the coast of Ruined Earth California, where ...
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 ...