SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 16 July 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 14 July 2025
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Somewhere in Time
Film (1980). Universal Pictures. Directed by Jeannot Swzarc. Screenplay by Richard Matheson based on his novel Bid Time Return (1975). Produced by Stephen Deutsch and Ray Stark (uncredited). Cast includes Susan French, Christopher Reeve, Christopher Plummer, Jane Seymour, George Voskovec, Teresa Wright. 103 minutes. Colour. / 1972: as young Richard Collier (Reeve) celebrates the debut of his play, an aged woman (French) approaches, ...
Markson, David
(1927-2010) US author of the stringently Modernist Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988), whose protagonist may be the last human (see Last Man) left on Earth; the novel is couched as an array of assertive, gnomic paragraphs in the style of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), and similarly dramatizes the gap (or perhaps aporia) between the world and the propositions ...
Ludington, James
(1827-1891) US entrepreneur, Utopian thinker and developer, and author; the city of Ludington, Michigan was developed by Ludington according to his arguments about the natural (i.e. rational) construction of an ideal place to live. His novel, Various revelations: With an account of the Garden of Eden, and the Settlement of the Eastern Continent, as Related by the Leaders of the Wandering Tribes [for full subtitle see Checklist] (1876) as Anonymous ...
Lu, Marie
Pseudonym of Chinese-born author Xiwei Lu (1984- ), in US from early childhood. She remains best known for her first series, the Young Adult Legend sequence beginning with Legend (2011), set in a moderately distant Near Future balkanized Dystopian America with a geographical focus on Los Angeles (see California). Three loci of ...
I Was a Teenage Werewolf
Film (1957; vt Blood of the Werewolf). Sunset Productions, American International Pictures. Produced by Herman Cohen. Directed by Gene Fowler, Jr. Written by Cohen and Abel Kandel (credited as Ralph Thornton). Makeup by Phillip Scheer (credited as Philip Scheer). Cast includes Whit Bissell, Michael Landon, Yvonne Lime and Charles Wilcox (credited as Tony Marshall). 76 minutes. Black and white. / As the film begins, ...
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 ...