SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 8 August 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 3 August 2026
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Kacvinsky, Katie
(? - ) US author whose work has been restricted to the Young Adult market, with an emphasis on teenage romances; in the Maddie sequence beginning with Awaken (2011), this pattern is integrated with some smoothness into an sf world: a Near Future California whose Dystopian nature is sensed by the young ...
Topping, Keith
(1963- ) UK author, journalist and broadcaster whose fiction output of sf interest consists of ties to the Doctor Who universe, beginning with Doctor Who: The Devil Goblins from Neptune (1997) with Martin Day. His nonfiction, besides collaborations with Day and Paul Cornell, includes the ...
Basil, Otto
(1901-1983) Austrian author active in the Austrian underground during World War Two; his sf novel, Wenn das der Führer wüßte ["If Only the Führer Knew"] (1966; cut trans Thomas Weyr as The Twilight Men 1968), is set in an Alternate History in which Hitler Wins in 1945 through the use of atomic weapons; Hitler's ...
de Chomón, Segundo
(1871-1929) Spanish/Catalan (see Catalan SF) silent film director, cinematographer and writer who worked on many films (see Cinema) for the French film company Pathé Frères. Whilst in Spain he made Gulliver en el país de los gigantes (1903; vt Gulliver in the Land of Giants) – not to be confused with Georges Méliès's ...
Academic Journal
In strict definition these are critical journals about science fiction, featuring no fiction other than as reference, published by academic establishments. By wider acceptance, however, these can include other critical Magazines produced within the science fiction fraternity which provide serious discussion and analysis of the genre to academic standards. / Academic interest in sf did not fully emerge until the 1970s (see ...
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 ...