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Sunday 7 December 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 1 December 2025
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Stoppard, Tom
Working name of Czech-born playwright and screenwriter Tomáš Straussler (1937-2025), in the UK since 1946, the Stoppard surname being acquired from his stepfather when his widowed mother remarried in 1945. His early dramatic work was characterized by extravagant wit and wordplay, and an Absurdist application of logic to surreal or insane situations. Following the broadcast of several Radio plays, his ...
Croatia
Croatian sf in its infancy (especially after the nineties) is not very different from the East European fiction and we can compare it to the Russian school of fiction. In the early days of sf in Croatia, writers dealt with adventurous and utopian themes, but later their focus shifted more to existential and social issues, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Croatian Patriotic war in the nineties; typically they now wrote about the life of the "little man" who is repressed by ...
Skyrack
UK Fanzine (1959-1971) edited by Ron Bennett, which was Britain's principal and indispensable Newszine throughout the 1960s. There were 96 issues in all, stencil-duplicated in UK quarto format, typically 4pp; #1 was dated April 1959 and #96 was dated July 1971, there having been a long gap since the penultimate #95 in May 1968. The title masthead used from #2 onward was lettered by Eddie ...
Thornton, John
(? -? ) UK author of A Voyage to Immanuel's Land [full title in Checklist below] (1826) anonymous, a Fantastic Voyage devoted to the promulgation of Christian doctrine, allegorized on the model of John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1677-1684), not deftly. [JC]
Russell, Ken
(1927-2011) UK film and television director, of greatest sf interest in this area for Altered States (1980), which see. His Gothic (1986) features the famous gathering at the Villa Diodati that included Lord Byron, John Polidori and Mary Shelley. The Lair of the White Worm (1988) is loosely based on Bram ...
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 ...