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.
Site updated on 16 June 2025
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
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. ...
Lafferty, R A
(1914-2002) US author who worked in the electrical business until retiring to write full-time in 1970; he came to writing only in his forties, publishing his first sf, "Day of the Glacier", with The Science Fiction Stories in January 1960. Over the next twenty-five years (he reportedly retired from writing at the age of about seventy) he produced very many stories – about 200 have been published – and a number of novels. The ...
Paranoia
Paranoia is common in sf; schizophrenia (which we also cover here, although aware that it is a wholly different condition) is comparatively rare. Both are also discussed in rather a different context under Psychology. / It is obviously necessary to distinguish between sf stories about paranoia (a fairly small group) and sf stories whose implicit attitude is paranoid (an extremely large group); most stories discussed below belong to the latter group. Paranoia ...
Liquid Sky
Film (1982). Z Films. Directed by Slava Tsukerman. Written by Tsukerman, Carlisle, Nina V Kerova. Cast includes Anne Carlisle, Susan Doukas, Paula E Sheppard and Otto von Wernherr. 112 minutes. Colour. / Aliens who have landed their tiny flying saucer on the roof of a Manhattan penthouse (see New York) observe the lives of strange young people: fashionable, Drug-using, white-faced Punk/New Wavers. The ...
Cast, P C
(1960- ) US author, almost exclusively of Young Adult fantasy, much of it with her daughter Kristin Cast in the House of Night sequence beginning with Marked (2007), set in an Alternate History version of America inhabited by both homo sapiens and "vampyres" (see Vampires); she also collaborated on a sequel series, ...
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 ...