SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 16 July 2026
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 14 July 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Venturini, Fred
(1980- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Threshold" (in Sick Things: An Anthology of Extreme Creature Horror, anth 2010, edited by Cheryl Mullenax), and whose Young Adult first novel, The Samaritan (2011; vt The Heart Does Not Grow Back 2014), also makes use of Horror in SF tropes to give verisimilitude to the story of a highschool ...
Pelot, Pierre
Main pseudonym of French author Pierre Grosdemange (1945- ), prolific from the 1960s under this and other names including Pierre Suragne and Pierre Carbonari; he was first known for Westerns, in particular the Dylan Stark sequence [not listed below], though sf soon began to dominate his output; his first sf novel was La Septième Saison ["The Seventh Season"] (1972) as by Pierre Suragne in the publisher's ...
Kissick, Lucy
(? - ) UK planetary geochemist in the nuclear industry and author whose first novel, Plutoshine (2022), describes with numerate intensity the attempted Terraforming of Pluto (see Outer Planets) by a team of scientists and others troubled by evidences of sabotage. There is a remoteness to the telling that evokes the latter-day ...
Tie
1. A term used in this encyclopedia to designate a work whose subject matter is tied to a previous work or concept. In some respects, therefore, a tie clearly resembles a sequel. However, ties can be differentiated from sequels in two ways: first, a tie is generally written to occupy a different format or genre than the work which inspires it – novelizations are, for instance, often spun off from films, an example being The Sensitives (1968), Louis ...
Taine, John
Pseudonym for all his fiction of Scottish-born mathematician and author Eric Temple Bell (1883-1960), permanently in US from 1902; under his own name he wrote at least 250 papers and several studies in mathematical history and theory. Taine's first novels were Lost-World tales: The Purple Sapphire (1924), set in Tibet where an ancient race possesses the secret of atomic power; and The Gold Tooth (1927), set in Korea, where another ...
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 ...