SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 1 April 2023
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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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Thomas, D M
(1935-2023) UK poet and author who made use of sf themes most explicitly in such early Poetry as "The Head-Rape" in New Worlds for March 1968 and the two-part "Computer 70: Dreams & Lovepoems" (March-April 1970 New Worlds), a sequence assembled with other poetry of interest in Logan Stone (coll 1970); or the later "S. F." (in The Umbral Anthology of Science Fiction Poetry, anth ...
Queffélec, Henri
(1910-1992) French author, known mainly for novels about the sea, for which he became famous; of sf interest is a Near Future tale, Combat contre l'invisible (1958; trans Jonathan Griffin as Frontier of the Unknown 1960), set in a nuclear plant under construction, and examining with clear ironical intent his protagonist's faith that – despite upswelling conflicts – Reason will prevail, once the combatants stop to see it. ...
Wells, H G
(1866-1946) UK journalist, social critic and author, Rebecca West's partner 1913-1923; the most important of all nineteenth-century sf writers in the UK and in America as well, where his early work beginning with The Time Machine (1895) was widely published in contemporary editions. These novels and stories were particularly important in the evolution of Genre SF in America, through the purchase in the 1920s of several ...
Machinima
Term used to describe films produced by recording the output from a Videogame as it is being played. This approach can produce visuals comparable in quality with those created by conventional computer animation techniques for considerably less effort, though clearly the choice of subject matter is affected by the nature of the game being used. Early examples of the form were created by players of Quake (1996) by adding (generally ...
Imaginary Voyages
A term much used in the Terminology of sf/fantasy critics, probably derived from the French, whose name for the genre is "voyages imaginaires". From this term was also derived Voyages extraordinaires, the overall series title used by publisher Jules Hetzel on the novels of Jules Verne. In this encyclopedia the theme is treated under ...
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 ...