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.
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Peacock, Thomas Love
(1785-1866) UK businessman, poet and author, with the East India Company 1819-1856, active initially as a poet from before 1805; his first full-length fiction, Headlong Hall (dated 1816 but 1815), is a discussion novel or symposium, set in the Welsh country estate of Squire Harry Headlong ab-Rhaiader, the Gothic description of which is fantastically exaggerated; the tale features a series of monomaniacal talking heads, whose individual maggots govern their names and natures and ...
Mårtensson, Bertil
(1945-2018) Swedish philosopher and author. Mårtensson began reading sf in the mid-1950s, became active in Swedish sf Fandom in 1962 and published his first professional story: "Urhemmet" ["Original Home"] in the sf magazine Häpna! for December 1963. An extremely active fan, he edited numerous Fanzines during the 1960s and again in the 1990s, contributed stories, poetry, ...
Ashley, Allen
(? - ) UK author who began publishing fiction of genre interest with the horror tale, "Dead to the World" as by Allen A Lucas in Fantasy Tales for Winter 1982, and who published frequently in the 1990s; much of this material is assembled in Somnambulists (coll 2004). A short novel, The Planet Suite (1996 chap), is characteristically built around loose permutations – less rigorous than ...
Painter, Thomas
(1885-1970) US author who collaborated with Alexander Laing (whom see for details) on The Motives of Nicholas Holtz, being the Weird Tale of the Ironville Virus (1936; vt The Glass Centipede, Retold from the Original Sources 1936). [PN]
Snell, Roy J
(1878-1959) US author of at least eighty-five Young Adult novels under his own name and as by David O'Hara, James Craig and Joseph Marino, most of them specifically directed to boys, though he wrote at least one associational series of mysteries for girls; his tales for younger children, beginning with Little White Fox and His Arctic Friends (1916), verge routinely on Animal Fantasy [see The ...
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 ...