SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 11 November 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 10 November 2025
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Lewis, Roy
(1913-1996) UK economist, publisher, author and journalist, editor of New Commonwealth 1953-1954, later with the Economist and The Times, and the author of several political/sociological studies. His Prehistoric SF novel, What We Did to Father (1960; vt The Evolution Man; or, How I Ate My Father 1960; vt The Evolution Man 1963; vt Once Upon an Ice Age 1979), amusingly concentrates ...
Shadows of Saturn
US Online Magazine and Semiprozine produced by Peter Burtis, Intervale, New Hampshire which ran for just three issues, April/May to August/September 2005. The magazine was dedicated to "dark science fiction, fantasy and slipstream stories with horror elements", according to its now defunct website, and the contents of the three issues certainly emphasized the dark and fantastic. James S Dorr's "City on Fire" (April/May 2005) ...
Lawrence, James Cooper
(1890-1932) US industrialist and author of The Year of Regeneration: An Improbable Fiction (1932), in which a man living in 1983 recounts the technological Inventions and Political innovations – perhaps uncomfortably fascist in their implications for current readers – that brought the world out of depression and into a state approaching Utopia. [JC]
Stacy, Ryder
Joint pseudonym of Jan Stacy and Ryder Syvertsen (whom see for titles), and solo pseudonym, after 1985, of the latter. [JC]
Vulcan
This is the usual name given to an imagined planet within the orbit of Mercury, first proposed in 1859 by Urbain De Vernier to explain irregularities in Mercury's orbit (now understood to be an effect of Einstein's Theory of Relativity). Such a planet is observed in Donald W Horner's fanciful By Aeroplane to the Sun: Being the Adventures of a Daring Aviator and His Friends (1910), 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 ...