SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 22 April 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 21 April 2025
Sponsor of the day: Joe Haldeman
Broderick, Damien
(1944-2025) Australian author, editor and critic; he had a PhD in the semiotics of fiction, science and sf with special reference to the work of Samuel R Delany. He edited four anthologies of Australian sf: The Zeitgeist Machine (anth 1977), Strange Attractors (anth 1985), Matilda at the Speed of Light (anth 1988) and Centaurus: The Best of Australian Science Fiction (anth ...
Meyer, John J
(1873-1948) US author of several loosely linked apostrophic picaresques. They break down into two rough series. The Cerebroscope sequence – comprising 20,000 Trails Under the Universe with the Cerebroscope [for full subtitles throughout see Checklist] (1917) and The Deer-Smellers of Haunted Mountain (1921) – features a device, the cerebroscope, capable of Communications with the dead, of use when the protagonist ...
Greenleaf, William
(1948- ) US author, not to be confused with the William Greenleaf (1917-1975) whose works are in the field of economics; Greenleaf began publishing sf with his first novel, Timejumper (1980), an adventure incorporating an unusually subtle presentation of the rite of passage – the empowering journey of the protagonist towards a culture-redeeming Conceptual Breakthrough – central to the sf genre. His ...
Buchholz, Matthew
(? -? ) US artist and author, initially sf interest for Alternate Histories of the World (graph 2013), a fantasticated chronological sequence of images taken from various historical (or quasi-historical) events, each of them textually and visually estranged into Alternate History understandings of the events in question. Sometimes the estrangements read as sf, sometimes as fantasy, sometimes as delusion, ...
Teleportation
Although a common item of sf Terminology, this word is (or has been) used in three different ways. / 1. Charles Fort used it in Wild Talents (1932) as a synonym for "psychokinesis" or, later, Telekinesis; i.e., the ability to move objects by the power of the mind alone. This seems to be the first appearance of the term in print, as is Fort's use of "teleport" as a verb in ...
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 ...