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. ...
Asimov, Janet
(1926-2019) US psychoanalyst and author, married to Isaac Asimov from 1973 until his death in 1992; she signed her early books J O Jeppson. Most of her sf is written for children, though her first venture, The Second Experiment (1974) as Jeppson, is an expansive tale whose main protagonist – a Robot – traces and deeply impacts upon the long story of the race that created him (see ...
Fahrenheit 451
Film (1966). Anglo-Enterprise and Vineyard/Universal. Directed by François Truffaut. Written by Truffaut, Jean-Louis Richard, based on Fahrenheit 451 (February 1951 Galaxy as "The Fireman"; exp 1953) by Ray Bradbury. Cast includes Julie Christie, Cyril Cusack, Anton Diffring and Oscar Werner. 112 minutes. Colour. / Bradbury's angry parable is about a future Dystopia in ...
Faville, Barry
(1939- ) New Zealand author, mostly of work for the Young Adult market; his second novel, The Return (1987), is of sf interest for its depiction of the effects on an isolated New Zealand village of the Mysterious-Stranger-like visit of a young man whose nature and goals are obscure, but whose powers of Telepathy threaten to reveal the true nature of the ...
Palumbo, David
(1982- ) American artist, son of artist Julie Bell and sf scholar Donald E Palumbo, and brother of artist Anthony Palumbo. He received formal training at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts from 2000 to 2004 and was informally mentored by his mother and his stepfather Boris Vallejo. He then became active in a number of areas, including exhibitions of his fine art, ...
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 ...