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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. ...
Lanchester, John
(1962- ) German-born journalist and author, in UK from 1972, most of whose fiction has been nonfantastic, though his first novel, The Debt to Pleasure (1996), comes close to regions of Fantastika as its gourmet protagonist travels through a surreal France, arriving at what he claims to be his home, which he immediately weaponizes. Capital (2012) is a nonfantastic anatomy of London and ...
Diderot, Denis
(1713-1784) French philosopher, editor and author who edited and wrote (with Jean le Rond d'Alembert until 1759) the Encylopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une société de gens de lettres ["Encyclopedia: or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts, by a Company of Men of Letters"] (1751-1772 28vols), an Enlightenment masterpiece. Diderot's insistence on a single alphabet, avowedly ...
Sanborn, Robin
(? - ) US author in whose Near Future novel, The Book of Stier (1971), a youth movement inspired by the Music of the mysterious Richard Stier overtopples all American institutions. As a sign of the devastation wreaked by this countercultural putsch, Canada eventually takes over the USA. [JC] see also: Messiahs. /
Sunn Classic Pictures
US film production and distribution company founded in 1971 by Rayland Jensen and based in Park City, near Salt Lake City, Utah: it was a subsidiary of the Schick razor company (and was sometimes called Schick Sunn Classic Pictures). In 1980 the company was bought by Taft Broadcasting, eventually being renamed Taft International Pictures, until being subsumed into another company in 1987. Sunn Classic made and distributed family films and were early users of audience testing to shape a film'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 ...