SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 19 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.
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Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Edisonade
Daedalus was the first inventor hero, but he was also a bureaucrat; and when he built the Labyrinth he did so as a wage-slave or sharecropper, on hire to the king. For that reason the headword for this entry, which is about the creation of an American dream of freelance heroism, has not been formed from his name. As used here the term "edisonade" or "Edisonade" – which is derived from Thomas Alva Edison in the same way ...
Kojima, Hideo
(1963- ) Japanese Game designer who began work on Videogames with Penguin Adventure (1986 Konami, MSX) designed by Hiroyuki Fukui, Ryouhei Shogaki, an action game in which the player must bring home a golden apple to cure an ailing penguin princess. Kojima's influence is not, however, especially noticeable in this work. The first game he actually designed was Metal Gear ...
Wright, S Fowler
(1874-1965) UK author, employed as an accountant until middle-age. In 1917 he was a founder of the Empire Poetry League and edited until 1932 the League's journal Poetry, which serialized his translations of Dante Alighieri's Inferno and Purgatorio; he also edited many anthologies for the League's Merton Press, publishing some early work by Olaf Stapledon. Wright's first book was ...
McCann, Edson
Pseudonym used by Frederik Pohl and Lester del Rey for the single novel Preferred Risk (June-September 1955 Galaxy; 1955), which was hurriedly written for a Galaxy Science Fiction novel competition because no acceptable outside submission had been received. Cast in the same mould as Pohl's and C M Kornbluth's ...
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 ...