SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 19 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.
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Sinclair, Iain
(1943- ) UK bookseller (retired), poet and author whose fiction is better described as Fantastika than as sf proper, just as the work of his main American mentor, William S Burroughs can be so designated. Studies and mythopoetic explorations of London, comprising a large body of fiction and nonfiction, have provided Sinclair with a central focus from the beginning of his ...
Starcraft
Videogame (1998). Blizzard Entertainment (BE). Designed by James Phinney, Chris Metzen. Platforms: Win (1998); Mac (1999); vt Starcraft 64, N64 (2000). / Starcraft is a Real Time Strategy game, played in a two-dimensional overhead view. Its setting owes much to the films Aliens (1986) and Predator (1987). ...
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
US tv series (1955-1965). Shamley Productions for Revue Studios, Universal Television. Executive producer: Alfred Hitchcock. Producers were Joan Harrison and Norman Lloyd. Directors included Hitchcock, Robert Stevens, Paul Henreid, Herschel Daugherty, Norman Lloyd, Arthur Hiller, Alan Crosland Jr, James Neilson and Jus Addiss. Writers included Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, Harlan ...
Connell, Adam
(1973- ) US author who, after an early career in the New York stock market, published an sf novel, Counterfeit Kings (2004), a noirish thriller, set on the Jovian moon Io (see Jupiter), whose protagonist must search for his world's missing king, a search complicated by a plethora of bodyguards known as Ringers who have been surgically altered so that they are indistinguishable from their monarch. [JC]
Meléndez, Francisco
(1941- ) Spanish illustrator and author, perhaps best known for two Steampunk-inflected fables of Invention, each featuring an obsessed tinkerer. El verdadero inventor del Buque Submarino (1989 chap; trans William Dyckes and adapted Robert Morton as The Mermaid and the Major: The True Story of the Invention of the Submarine 1991), which seems to be set in the eighteenth century, ...
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 ...