SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 13 October 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 12 October 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Edwards, Malcolm
(1949-2026) UK editor, critic and publisher, educated at Cambridge, where he graduated in anthropology. Active in UK sf Fandom in the 1970s and early 1980s, he published the first complete text of James Blish's "The Science in Science Fiction" (May 1951-May 1952 Science Fiction Quarterly) in his Fanzine Quicksilver #2 in 1971; edited the ...
Chess
Many sf stories make use of this ancient Board Game of stylized War, which emerged in recognizable form in India and China by approximately the sixth century and spread westward, reaching Europe by the eleventh century. Its numerous appearances in Fantasy include Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-glass (1871), whose introduction of living chess pieces has been ...
Lost
US tv series (2004-2010). Bad Robot for ABC. Created by J J Abrams, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. Producers include Abrams, Lindelof, Cuse and Bryan Burk. Directors include Abrams, Jack Bender, Stephen Williams and Paul A Edwards. Writers include Abrams, Lindelof, Cuse, Jeffrey Lieber, Elizabeth Sarnoff, Drew Goddard, Javier Grillo-Marxuach and Brian K Vaughan. Cast includes Matthew Fox as Jack Shephard, Evangeline ...
Dyson Sphere
Item of sf/scientific Terminology named for a concept put forward by the physicist Freeman J Dyson. According to Dyson, the logical power source for a sufficiently advanced galactic civilization would derive from the reconstruction of its solar system into an artificial biosphere completely enclosing – and thus trapping the maximum possible energy output from – the local sun. This original concept should more ...
Lippincott, David
(1924-1984) US advertising executive, composer and author whose Near-Future political Satire E Pluribus Bang! (1970) finds the US President involved in the murder of a Secret Service agent he finds in bed with his wife in a story that climaxes on a South Pacific Island where the mystery of Amelia Earhart's disappearance is solved. Tremor Violet (1975) is a ...
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 ...