SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 10 April 2026
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 6 April 2026
Sponsor of the day: David Cowhig
Mothership Zeta
US quarterly Online Magazine produced by Escape Artists, Inc. and edited by Mur Lafferty. It is a companion to the podzines Escape Pod, Pseudopod and Podcastle. After a small trial issue in September 2015, it appeared for six issues from October 2015 to January 2017 before it ran into financial difficulties. / Its emphasis was on fiction that was fun and did not take itself too seriously. That was ...
Identity Transfer
Transfer of the personality or Identity from one body to another is a popular sf theme, whether justified by Cartesian dualism (positing an immaterial personality or soul capable of existing independently of the body) or by the Computer analogy in which the mind is software running on the body's hardware or wetware. The protagonist of A E van Vogt's The World of Ā (August-October 1945 ...
History of SF
Sf is an impure genre (see Definitions of SF) which did not finally take shape until the late nineteenth century, although all its separate elements existed earlier. If the labelling of any earlier story as sf depended only on the presence of sf elements there would be many such. The Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, has a Fantastic Voyage and a great world-flood (see ...
O'Brien, Flann
Pseudonym of Irish author and civil servant Brian O'Nolan or Ó Nualláin (1911-1966), who also wrote – mainly for his 1940-1966 Irish Times newspaper column "Cruiskeen Lawn" ["The Little Overflowing Jug"] – as Myles na Gopaleen ["Myles of the Little Horses" or "Myles of the Ponies"], sometimes rendered Myles na gCopaleen. The Irish Times columns are classics of often fantastic Humour; various selections have been published [see ...
Casewit, Curtis W
(1922-2002) German-born author, in US from 1948; linguistically fluent, he did military service with the French Army in World War Two, later serving as an interpreter for the British Army. Almost all of his work was nonfiction, much of it about skiing; he began publishing work of genre interest with an sf story, "The Mask", in Weird Tales for March 1952. His sf novel, The Peacemakers (1960), depicts conflicting societies in a virtually depopulated ...
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 ...