SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 ...
Sunn Classic Pictures
US film production and distribution company founded in 1971 by Rayland Jensen and based in Park City, near Salt Lake City, Utah: it was a subsidiary of the Schick razor company (and was sometimes called Schick Sunn Classic Pictures). In 1980 the company was bought by Taft Broadcasting, eventually being renamed Taft International Pictures, until being subsumed into another company in 1987. Sunn Classic made and distributed family films and were early users of audience testing to shape a film's ...
Darlington, Andrew
(1947- ) UK poet and author, sometimes writing as Andy Darlington, who began to publish work of genre interest with "Stairs and Steps" in Corridor for May-June 1972; a selection of his poetry has been assembled as Euroshima Mon Amour: Poems from the Inner Mind to the Outer Limits (coll 2000 chap) (see Poetry), and a selection of his short fiction as A Saucerful of Secrets (coll 2016). Darlington's sf novel, ...
Parsec
The official SI unit of astronomical distance; the name is a contraction of "parallax-second". The measure was introduced by UK astronomer Herbert Hall Towner (1861-1930). As the Earth travels from one side of the Sun to the other in half a year, parallax makes the position of any comparatively nearby star apparently shift. Using simple trigonometry, from the observed angular displacement of the star's measured position and knowledge of the distance between Earth and Sun the distance of the ...
Walotsky, Ron
(1943-2002) US illustrator who began his career in sf art with the cover for the May 1967 edition of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, illustrating Phyllis Gotlieb's novelette "Planetoid Idiot". Walotsky would continue to be associated with F&SF for the rest of his life, painting some sixty covers for the magazine. He also produced many book covers and brochure paintings for 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 ...