SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 5 June 2023
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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Blyth, James
(1864-1933) UK author, born Henry James Catling Clabburn, changing his name legally to James Blyth in 1898. He was a fairly prolific producer of popular fiction who is best remembered in the sf field for his Future War novels, in all of which Britain is pitted against Germany: in The Tyranny (1907), the UK is dominated by a tyrant and at war with Germany; in The Swoop of the Vulture (1909), a title P G ...
Sun Ra
(1914-1993) US jazz composer and musician, born Herman Poole Blount. Sun Ra played and released a large quantity of music, mostly in the postwar period, all of it inflected by his fascination with outer space, Alien encounter, Ancient Egypt (whose Sun god inspired his working name) and Atlantis. / Ra spent the 1950s mostly recording in Chicago. In 1961 he moved to New York, and his music grew more ...
Aronica, Lou
Working name of US publisher and editor Louis Michael Aronica (1958- ), with Bantam Books 1979-1994, as Vice President and Publisher of the Spectra sf list which he established in 1985, Vice President and Publisher of mass-market books 1989-1992, and Vice President and Deputy Publisher 1992-1994; he was also editor of the Foundation sf programme until it was merged into the Bantam list. In 1994 he became Senior Vice President and ...
Douglass, Ellsworth
Pseudonym of US real-estate speculator, insurance broker and author Elmer Dwiggins (1863-1933), whose enterprises (for which he was jailed in 1919-1920) took him to various countries around the turn of the century; his fiction, including his one sf novel, was written during these travels. His first story, "The Wheels of Dr Ginochio Gyves" (September 1899 Cassell's Magazine) with Edwin Pallander, describes a gyroscopically controlled ...
Morgan, J M
Working name of US author Jill Meredith Morgan (1946- ), most of work has been horror for Young Adult readers as by Morgan Fields, Jill Morgan and Jessica Pierce. The Spider's Child series as by Pierce, beginning with The Spider's Child: Volume 1: Trapped (1994), is an early example of the fruitful fantasy topos in which the protagonist is trapped within a book [for Book and Story 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 ...