SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 14 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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Green, Sharon
(1942-2022) US author who came to notice for two almost simultaneous sequences of sadomasochistic novels in the manner of John Norman, with which the advertising copy explicitly linked them: the Jalav/Amazon Warrior sequence, beginning with The Crystals of Mida (1982) and ending with To Battle the Gods (1986), which is set in a fabulated Amazon; and the Terrilian Sequence, beginning with The Warrior Within ...
Atherton, Gertrude
(1857-1948) US author, biographer and historian. In a long career that extended from 1882 to 1946 she published about 50 books in a multitude of genres, beginning to publish work of genre interest with "The Caves of Death" for San Francisco News Letter in 1886; her first novel was an occult romance involving metempsychosis, What Dreams May Come: A Romance (1888) as by Frank Lin (see Reincarnation). In ...
Cultural Engineering
A phrase not especially common in sf Terminology, although what it refers to is fundamental to the genre. The idea of humans deliberately altering the nature of alien cultures (or of Aliens doing it to us), or indeed of doing the same to isolated cultures on Earth or colony worlds, is often evoked in sf – sometimes approvingly, slightly more often disapprovingly. This is especially so in stories in which ...
Robertson, Al
(? - ) UK musician and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Golden" in The Third Alternative for Spring 2004; his first novel Crashing Heaven (2015), which begins the Station series, is a Space Opera with Cyberpunk intonations, set in a period after Earth has been abandoned due to the behaviour of ...
Incredible Melting Man, The
Film (1977). Quartet Productions, American International Pictures. Written and directed by William Sachs. Additional dialogue Rebecca Ross. Cast includes Michael Aldredge, Burr DeBenning, Alex Rebar and Ann Sweeny. 84 minutes. Colour. / By 1977 the idea of an astronaut returning to Earth after being contaminated by some dread space infection or irradiation was well and truly a Clichéd subgenre of ...
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 ...