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 ...
Matsumoto Leiji
Working name of Akira Matsumoto (1938-2023), Japanese artist and illustrator whose Space Opera stories and designs became icons of Manga and Anime in the 1970s and 1980s. Matsumoto's father was a pioneer aviator who had trained in inter-war France with aggressor squadrons, but fell on hard times in the 1940s. While Matsumoto's brothers went into engineering, the self-taught Matsumoto ...
M F Enterprises
US publishing company based in New York City, founded and sometimes edited by the notorious Myron Fass, who had issued cheaply-produced magazines under various names and imprints in numerous genres since the 1950s. Launched in 1966, M F Enterprises produced a short-lived line of colour Comics including titles in the western and teenage humour genres. It is best remembered for an additional version of ...
Reid, C Lestock
(1888-1954) India-born UK army officer and author, in active service during World War One. His adventure novels include The Trail of Pharaoh's Treasure: A Romance of Africa (1924); Sons of Solomon (1931), a Lost Race tale also set in Africa, sadly defaced for modern readers by its racism (see Race in SF); and Dark Destiny (1936). ...
Big Pull, The
UK tv serial (1962). BBC. Producer Terence Dudley. Written Robert Gould. Cast includes William Dexter, Susan Purdie, June Tobin and Frederick Treves. Six 30-minute episodes. Black and white. / This fondly remembered thriller about alien Invasion, quite generously budgeted, has an astronaut returning to Earth after contamination by something strange in the Van Allen belts. There follow a series of strange "fusions" in which pairs of humans, one "dead" and ...
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 ...