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.
Site updated on 16 June 2025
Sponsor of the day: Ansible Editions
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. ...
Ahern, Jerry
Working name of US author Jerome Morrell Ahern (1946-2012), most of whose output consisted of violent Weapons-oriented Post-Holocaust novels, most notably in his Survivalist sequence, in which ex-CIA agent John Rourke attempts to preserve his family after a global nuclear conflict. This is perhaps the most influential series in the subgenre of Survivalist Fiction. The first arc of the ...
Corman, Roger
(1926-2024) US film-maker, a number of whose films are sf. Born in Los Angeles, he graduated in engineering from Stanford University in 1947, and spent a period in the US Navy and a term at Oxford University before going to Hollywood, where he began to write screenplays; his first sale was Highway Dragnet (1954), a picture he coproduced. He soon formed his own company and launched his spectacularly low-budget career. From 1956 he was regularly associated with ...
Corley, James
(1947- ) UK author and computer programmer whose first novel, Benedict's Planet (1976), combines Space Opera and some rather technical speculations about the possibility of Faster-than-Light travel in a somewhat overcrowded tale in which the discoverer of a new source of fuel runs into complex trouble. Neither Orsini Godbase (1978) nor Sundrinker (1980), ...
Compton Crook/Stephen Tall Memorial Award
Sf/fantasy/horror Award which honours the best first novel of the year, as voted by members of the US Baltimore area's annual Convention, Balticon. It is named for Compton Crook (1908-1981), who published sf as Stephen Tall. The award was first presented in 1983 for work first published in 1982. An additional prize of, currently, $1000 goes to the winner. [DRL] Winners 1983: Donald ...
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 ...