SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 14 May 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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Fabian, Stephen E
(1930-2025) American artist, sometimes credited as Steve Fabian or simply Fabian. The self-trained Fabian first worked as an electronic engineer, but he began contributing art to Fanzines in the late 1960s and became a full-time professional artist in 1973. He did a number of covers and interior art for SF Magazines, mostly Amazing, Fantastic, and ...
Olukotun, Deji Bryce
(? - ) US lawyer and author whose first novel, Everyone Comes from Belterra: When America Owned the Amazon (2009) as Deji Olukotun, is a nonfantastic tale about the rubber industry set in Brazil. The first volume of Nigerians in Space sequence comprising Nigerians in Space (2014) and After the Flare (2017) is also essentially nonfantastic, though it revolves around an attempt to persuade expatriate Nigerian ...
What a Cartoon!
US animated tv series (1995-1997; vt The What a Cartoon! Show; vt World Premiere Toons). Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, Cartoon Network Studios. Created by Fred Seibert. 48 seven-minute shorts. Colour. / This Television Anthology Series was intended to emulate the mid-twentieth century's golden age of cartoon shorts – as exemplified by ...
Sturgeon's Law
An aphorism formulated by Theodore Sturgeon in the early 1950s: "Ninety percent of everything is crud." This needs to be placed in context as his response to blanket condemnations of sf which were based on the worst examples of the genre. According to James Gunn, Sturgeon's Law originated in a Sturgeon talk at the 1953 Worldcon, and was phrased approximately as ...
Schongut, Emanuel
(1936- ) American artist, sometimes credited in error as Emmanuel Schongut. He was educated at New York's Pratt Institute, where he later worked as an instructor, and has applied his skills to diverse artistic endeavours including book covers, children's books, posters, and advertisements. His genre work began in the 1960s, when he painted a number of sf book covers for Doubleday, and later for other publishers. His distinctive style, usually featuring simply drawn human ...
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 ...