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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Preston, Douglas
(1956- ) US author, brother of Richard Preston, most of whose novels of sf interest have been with Lincoln Child; they are listed below for convenience, but for discussion see the entry for Child. The Wyman Ford sequence of Technothrillers, by Preston alone, comprises Blasphemy (2008), a Near Future tale in which a ...
Caldecott, Moyra
Pseudonym of South-African born author Olivia Brown (1927-2015), in the UK from 1951, almost all her work being fantasy for Young Adult readers [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below], beginning with Weapons of the Wolfhound (1976); she was best-known for the Tall Stones sequence beginning with The Tall Stones (1977; vt Guardians of the Tall Stones ...
McGuffin
A term devised by Alfred Hitchcock, who describes it at considerable length in François Truffaut's Le Cinéma Selon Hitchcock (1966; trans Helen G Scott as Hitchcock 1967), as an object whose loss – or rumours of whose existence – triggers the cast of a thriller or detective film into searching for it, or fighting for it, or running from it, but which has in fact little or no intrinsic meaning once the ...
Altov, Genrikh
Pseudonym of Russian author and sf critic Genrikh Altshuller (1926-1998); a trained engineer, he registered dozens of patents, and is most widely known for establishing the Teoriya Resheniya Izobreatatelskikh Zadach (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) or TRIZ. He spent four years in a prison camp for political dissidents after writing a scathing letter to Stalin criticizing the lack of industrial and scientific inventiveness in the USSR. His unpublished "Altov's Register" is a mammoth ...
Itäranta, Emmi
(1976- ) Finnish journalist, scriptwriter and author, resident in England, who either translates into or writes the original manuscripts of her novels in English; her first novel, Teemestarin kirja ["The Book of the Master of Tea"] (2012; English version by author as Memory of Water 2014), is a Young Adult tale set in a Dystopian seemingly distant ...
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 ...