SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 17 January 2022
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 10 January 2022
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Kepler, Johannes
(1571-1630) German astronomer, one-time assistant to Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) and later imperial mathematician and astrologer to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II. Kepler's contribution to Astronomy – most notably his three laws of planetary motion – provided vital groundwork for Newton's cosmological synthesis. In 1593 he prepared a dissertation on the heliocentric theory, which explained how events in the heavens would be seen by an observer stationed on the Moon; a new draft, in ...
Hunger Dogs, The
The only original Graphic Novel by Comics pioneer Jack Kirby, and his last major work, published in 1985 by DC Comics. A continuation and culmination of the artist's New Gods series, which was published by DC from 1971 to 1972, The Hunger Dogs (DC Graphic Novel #4) was Kirby's long-awaited and long-gestating coda to the series, featuring a temporary victory over the forces of evil embodied by the super-Villain character Darkseid as the slaves (or "hunger dogs") that labour on the planet ...
Szabó-Zalán, Nicholas
(?1886-? ) Hungarian author, in active service during World War One, seemingly in Argentina from some point around 1945, after Hungary began to slip into the grasp of the USSR. Mission to Earth (1955) – whose apparent subtitle, The Book of Many Colours, appears only on the dust jacket – presents a kind of sacred drama in terms of a roughshod Equipoise. The Alien who lands his Spaceship on Earth is also St Peter on a fact-finding mission on the behalf of God. In ...
LeBlanc, Maurice
(1864-1941) French author in various genres, though after he began the Arsène Lupin sequence, with "L'Arrestation d'Arsène Lupin" ["The Arrest of Arsène Lupin"] (15 July 1905 Je Sais Tout), he focused most of his energies on his raffish, inexplicably elusive gentleman thief and frustrator of "Herlock Sholmes" or "Holmlock Shears" (these and other names were used in attempts to placate Arthur Conan Doyle). In later volumes – twenty were issued in all, beginning with ...
Oppenheim, E Phillips
(1866-1946) UK author, publishing at least 160 novels from 1887 until just before his death, some as by Anthony Partridge; most of them are tales of espionage or society detective mysteries, the best known being The Great Impersonation (February-July 1919 The Grand Magazine; 1920), a non-fantastic thriller. His sf novels of interest – several of the titles given in the Checklist below are romantic-fantasy potboilers, some with Ruritanian elements – begin with Mysterious Mr Sabin ...
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 ...