SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 10 August 2026
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 3 August 2026
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Scalzi, John
(1969- ) US author and journalist. Born in California, he studied at the University of Chicago (briefly under Saul Bellow) before taking on a career in journalism. He began publishing work of genre interest with "Alien Animal Encounters" in Strange Horizons for 15 October 2001, and soon published his first novel, the Military SF Old Man's War (2005), which ...
Galactic Empires
In The Universe Makers (1971) Donald A Wollheim attempts to distil from the range of futuristic visions presented by magazine sf a basic pattern – a "cosmogony of the future" – in which stages three to five (there are eight in all) describe "the rise and fall of the Galactic Empire", which is thus enshrined as the central myth of Genre SF. ("Empire" is here used with a general, almost metaphorical ...
Cybernetic Grandma, The
Czechoslovakian animated stop-motion film (1962; original title Kybernetická babička). Louthovy Film Praha. Studia Kreslencho a Loutkoveho Filmu. Directed and written by Jiří Trnka. 28 minutes. Colour. / In the future a young girl is staying with her grandma in the country, when a flying device delivers a telegram which is played like a vinyl record (see Communications). It is from her father, saying she can now ...
Corlett, Anne
(? - ) UK criminal lawyer and author whose first novel after several nonfantastic tales, The Space Between the Stars (2017), attempts with some ambition to use a Space Opera frame to interrogate various practical and moral issues following the virtual elimination of Homo sapiens both on Earth and across a swathe of settled planets (see ...
Marriott, Michel
(? - ) US journalist – he has covered Technology issues for the New York Times since about 1987 – and author whose gonzo Technothriller, The Skull Cage Key (2008), set well into the Near Future in 2041, in a luridly noir New York beset by a craze for ...
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 ...