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Sunday 16 November 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 10 November 2025
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Wilson, Thomas H
Pseudonym of author Cecil Burleigh (1850-1921), author of Dime-Novel tales for boys under a wide variety of names; of sf interest is Lost at the North Pole; Or, the Kingdom of Ice (1888 The Boys of New York as by J G Bradley; 1899 chap) as Capt Thomas H Wilson, a Lost World tale featuring two warring races around the clement North Pole, one comprised of gigantic Blacks who are of course primitive, the other ...
Armour, R Coutts
(1874-1945) Australian author, who wrote popular fiction, mostly for magazines, under his own name and under various pseudonyms, including Coutts Brisbane, Pierre Quiroule (a probable House Name), Hartley Tremayne, Reid Whitley (or Whitly), and other names not yet discovered; his career extended from before World War One until at least the late 1930s in sf and continued into the early 1940s in ...
Wadsworth, Phyllis Marie
(1910-2005) UK author whose Overmind (1967) deals with Aliens who contact humanity via Telepathy from another Dimension, with news of the coming birth of a Messiah. [JC]
Moore, C L
(1911-1987) US author, collaborator with Henry Kuttner whom she married in 1940, and with whom she had collaborated since 1937 (see below). Before her intimate working association with Kuttner, she had, however, already achieved fame with her first story, "Shambleau" in Weird Tales for November 1933, a femme fatale tale of a psychic Vampire set on a ...
Science and Sorcery
Item of Terminology introduced in this encyclopedia for the genre-blending juxtaposition of sf and Fantasy settings, often presented as Parallel Worlds between which crossings may be made, and distinguished therefore from Equipoisal tales where any "crossings" tend to be integrated into the address of the tale, rather than working as transitions. (This use of crossings ...
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 ...