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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Jones, Jeffrey
(1944-2011) American artist born Jeffrey Durwood Jones, who for many years used the working name Jeff Jones, and after hormone therapy (from 1998) and gender transition was named and worked as Jeffrey Catherine Jones. After some initial work for Comic books in the mid-1960s, Jones began producing an amazing number of covers for various publishers, often illustrating works of Sword and Sorcery. This work immediately stood out for ...
Discovery
This thematic topic is closely linked with the broader subject of Invention (which see), since the discovery of a new principle is usually followed – often in sf, with implausible speed – by the invention of a means of exploiting it. The discovery of new places is dealt with various other entries including Colonization of Other Worlds, Lost Worlds (very often containing ...
Chikyū Bōeigun
Film (1957; vt The Mysterians; vt Earth Defense Force). Toho/MGM. Directed by Ishirō Honda. Written by Takeshi Kimura, based on a story by Jojiro Okami. Cast includes Akihiko Hirata, Kenji Sahara and Yumi Shirakawa. 89 minutes. Colour. / This Japanese sf Pulp epic is about Alien invaders, their own planet destroyed by nuclear Holocaust, who land in Japan seeking women for breeding ...
Warner, Harry, Jr
(1922-2003) US journalist, author and sf fan, publisher of several Fanzines, including Spaceways and the long-lived Horizons, which appeared regularly in FAPA from 1939 until his death. He was noted for prolific writing of letters of comment to others' fanzines for most of this period. Warner also made several professional sales to SF Magazines in the 1940s and 1950s, beginning with the poem ...
Relativity
Overall name for the theories of space-time Physics formulated by Albert Einstein (1869-1955): special relativity, proposed in 1905, and general relativity, proposed in 1916. Both theories, though initially controversial, have been exhaustively tested by experiment. / In special relativity it is axiomatic that there is no absolute or "privileged" frame of reference against which velocity can be measured: only the relative velocity of any given two bodies is ...
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 ...