SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 16 July 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.
Site updated on 14 July 2025
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Young Adult
Young Adult or YA sf, like Children's SF, is named for and defined by its target audience. The YA label is sometimes applied to any sf with young adult protagonists, but this approach is often problematic. For instance, Nnedi Okorafor's Binti novellas, starting with Binti (2015) have been included on many recommended YA sf lists, but Okorafor insists that they are not YA. This problem is more common ...
Martinson, Harry
(1904-1978) Swedish author and poet, active from the late 1920s, member of the Swedish Academy; recipient of the 1974 Nobel Prize for Literature. A prolific writer, Martinson's one contribution to sf is Aniara: en Revy om Människan i Tid och Rum (1953 Cikada; exp 1956; trans Hugh MacDiarmid and Elspeth Harley Schubert as Aniara: A Review of Man in Time and Space ...
Robbins, Trina
(1938-2024) US clothes designer, Comics illustrator and writer, editor, journalist and author, much of whose work in comics was for titles – from the early one-shot It Ain't Me Babe (1970), which she co-created – produced exclusively by women (see Feminism). Her responsibility for a full issue of Wonder Woman in 1985, the first time a woman did this comic, was also a significant marker. ...
Monster from Green Hell
Film (1957). Gross-Krasne Productions/Distributors Corporation of America. Produced by Al Zimbalist. Directed by Kenneth G Crane. Written by Endre Bohem and Louis Vittes. Cast includes Jim Davis, Joel Fluellen, Robert Griffin (credited as Robert E Griffin), Vladimir Sokoloff and Barbara Turner. 71 minutes. Black and white with concluding sequence in colour. / Dr Quent Brady (Davis) is a US Scientist conducting experiments concerning the effects of ...
Donner, Richard
Working name of Richard Donald Schwartzberg (1930-2021), US Television and Cinema director and producer whose early genre or genre-adjacent work for the small screen included directing six episodes of The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) – including the famous "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" (11 October 1963) written by Richard Matheson – ...
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 ...