SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 13 January 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 6 January 2025
Sponsor of the day: Conversation 2023
Peek, Hedley
(1858-1904) UK biscuit manufacturer, sportswriter, publisher and author of Nema and Other Stories (coll 1895), which contains fantasies; and The Chariot of the Flesh (1897), in which a proto-Superman, who has developed the power of Teleportation and has in other ways grown beyond his home in the West, travels to a hidden community of folk known as Aphar in the Himalayas, where he engages in advanced ...
Gadallah, Leslie
(1939- ) Canadian chemist, technical editor and author best known for her Empire of Kaz sequence – starting with Cat's Pawn (1987) – in which a human protagonist becomes involved with the eponymous Cat-like Alien Orioni, themselves involved in a desperate war against the invading Kazi, who dominate much of the Galaxy by the end of the second volume, Cat's Gambit (1990), ...
Reynolds, Joseph
(? - ) US author of Sex novels with sf elements, including Satan's Disciple (1968) and Operation Sextrip (1970). [JC]
Idler, The
UK general interest magazine, one of the first to appear following the enthusiastic reception of The Strand, but not a slavish imitation. It was founded by Robert Barr and William Dunkerley (better known as John Oxenham) with Jerome K Jerome as the initial editor. It ran from February 1892 to March 1911, monthly, missing just two months. Robert ...
Dickinson, Charles
(1951- ) US author of several non-genre novels, beginning with Waltz in Marathon (1983); his A Shortcut in Time (2003) is a Timeslip tale set in a Chicago suburb very similar to Arlington Heights (where he lives), where characters from different times become entangled according to their nature, with effects like those achieved by writers like Ray Bradbury, Jack ...
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 ...