SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 10 May 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 4 May 2026
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Conway, Gerard F
(1952-2026) US author informally known as Gerry Conway who began his career in Comics, writing some non-fantastic scripts for Marvel Comics, and editing the short-lived 1973 weird fiction magazine The Haunt of Horror and writing for the 1973-1975 anthology Comic Worlds Unknown. He also worked extensively for ...
Gamma
US Digest-size magazine. Five issues 1963-1965, published by Star Press, North Hollywood; edited by William F Nolan for three issues, then by Jack Matcha and Charles E Fritch. The fiction in this magazine – a blend of sf and fantasy – was of good quality, many stories being by Californian writers with film connections, like Charles Beaumont and ...
Bair, Patrick
Pseudonym of UK author David Groom (? - ), whose Faster! Faster! (1950) is a Dystopian fable with an sf flavour in which representatives of three classes, caught on a train which goes on for ever, must work out their destinies; its abstract nature differentiates the tale from his later work, though Gargantua Falls (1951) places very similar Satirical points in an only ...
Bell, Geo W
(1838-1907) US soldier (though his claim to the rank of Colonel has not been confirmed), real estate speculator, diplomat (Consul for the United States in Sydney, New South Wales, 1894-1900) and author; his sf novel, Mr Oseba's Last Discovery (1904 New Zealand) may have been written as a real estate promotion. The protagonist meets a traveling inhabitant of the Hollow Earth, who has arrived on the surface via the Arctic Symmes Hole (see John ...
Game-Worlds
Although this term may be applied to imaginary worlds governed by the rules of ancient games like Chess, this encyclopedia chiefly applies it to worlds designed by the manufacturers of Games – almost always Role Playing Games (or Gamebooks) or computer Adventure games (see Videogame). In the case of RPGs the ...
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 ...