SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 19 July 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 14 July 2026
Sponsor of the day: John Howard
Weiner, Homer
(? - ) US author whose Spacewater Blues (1980) is a Young Adult Satire, whose protagonists' experiences of a very Near Future America are enabled by their transit through another Dimension. They learn, mildly, about Sex. [JC]
Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game
Term used to describe a form of Massively Multiplayer Online Game with gameplay resembling that of a Computer Role Playing Game. Players create characters with abilities distinct from those of their makers, and use them to explore a shared fictional world and cooperate or compete with each other to fight the enemies they find there. MMORPGs differ from ...
Rud, Anthony
(1893-1942) US author and Pulp-magazine editor whose first story seems to have been "The October Blight" in The Green Book Magazine for March 1918. He contributed sf to Weird Tales, The Blue Book Magazine, Thrilling Wonder Stories and others; typical of this work is his first Weird Tales story "Ooze" (March 1923 ...
Murphy, G Read
(1856-1925) Australian magistrate and author, in whose Lost Race tale, Beyond the Ice: Being a Story of the Newly Discovered Region Round the North Pole: Edited from Dr Frank Farleigh's Diary by G Read Murphy (1894) an advanced civilization called Zara is discovered, along with three less advanced societies, around the North Pole. The former has flourished for hundreds of years, thanks to a modicum of ...
Jetta
US Comic (1952-1953). Three issues (numbered #5-#7). Standard Magazines, Inc. Artists Dan DeCarlo, Fred Eng and Joe Edwards; scripts by Joe Archibald and Dixon Wells. Each issue had five strips (though one was only a page or two) and one two-page text story. / With the popularity of Archie Comics – about the life of normal American teenager Archie Andrews and his friends in the town of Riverdale – it is not surprising that other comics appeared ...
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 ...