SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 20 June 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.
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Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Speculative Fiction and Beyond
US Online Magazine produced by John Bradt, Irvine, California. It saw just one preview issue in July 1996 before Bradt was involved in a serious car accident and was unable to continue. His dream was to produce the first independent professional online magazine, taking a lead from Omni Online; he had great plans, all of which came to nothing. Perhaps surprisingly, that first issue still survives on the internet (see link ...
Pratt, Ambrose
(1874-1944) Australian lawyer and author, in UK circa 1898-1905 where he began to publish stories and novels. Tales of interest include The Great "Push" Experiment (1902), in which a Sydney gang transforms its patch into an enclosed Utopia; Vigorous Daunt: Billionaire (1905), in which the English working class is saved from starvation; The Living Mummy (1910), where archaeologists in Egypt discover a mummy in ...
Marques, Patricia
(? - ) Portuguese-born author, in UK from the age of eight, whose Isabel Reis sequence of policiers beginning with The Colours of Death (2021) is set in an Alternate World version of Lisbon where some individuals exhibit Psi Powers, including Telekinesis and Telepathy, and who comprise a threatened ...
Four-Sided Triangle
Film (1952). Hammer. Directed by Terence Fisher. Written by Paul Tabori, Fisher, based on The Four-Sided Triangle (November 1939 Amazing as "The 4-Sided Triangle"; exp 1949) by William F Temple. Cast includes Stephen Murray, Barbara Payton and John Van Eyssen. 81 minutes, cut to 71 minutes. Black and white. / A scientist builds a ...
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 ...