SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 7 February 2025
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.
Site updated on 3 February 2025
Sponsor of the day: The League of Fan Funds
Sarrantonio, Al
(1952-2025) US editor and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Ahead of the Joneses" in Asimov's for March 1979. Much of his work was horror, sometimes tinged with sf (see Horror in SF), including his first novel, The Worms (1985), a Gothic tale set in Massachusetts with hints of H P Lovecraft; and the Equipoisal Moonbane ...
Haggard, H Rider
(1856-1925) UK civil servant, lawyer, agricultural expert and author. Haggard spent the years 1875-1881 in the Colonial Service in South Africa, where he gained much of the material for his fiction. On his return to the UK he read for the bar while at the same time beginning to produce novels and other work. With his third and fourth published novels, King Solomon's Mines (1885) and the even more successful She: A History of Adventure (2 October 1886-8 January 1887 ...
Firestone, Shulamith
(1945-2012) Canadian-born painter, activist and author, resident in the United States from childhood, who was a founding figure in radical Feminism, and a key thinker in the movement in late-1960s New York. / Firestone outlined her ideas in The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970), which argued, among other points, that women would not be truly liberated until they were freed from the shackles of ...
Komroff, Manuel
(1890-1974) US author of I, the Tiger (1933), a tale Equipoisal between fantasy and sf: the narration, from the point-of-view of a caged tiger, is fantasy; the Hollywood frame (see California), in which a "superfilm" is exorbitantly described, pushes some elements of Satire beyond the mundane. [JC]
Jones, Alice Eleanor
Working name of US academic and author Alice Eleanor Nearing (1916-1981), married to Homer Nearing Jr, whose surname she adopted legally. She began to publish work of genre interest with "Life, Incorporated" in Fantastic Universe for April 1955, and remained active for the next decade, though most of her work was nonfantastic, including one novel-length tale, "Strange Courtship" (5 March Redbook), which did not ...
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 ...