SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 10 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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Barker, Nicola
(1966- ) UK author, active from around 1990; her tales are almost exclusively set in the South-East of England, featuring characters who fit all too well into suburban subtopias, except for their tendency to commit mild verbal and physical mayhem on their surroundings. The mundanity of this world normally, in her work, seems shaky but does not normally spill over into the fantastic, though In the Approaches (2014) is partly narrated by a parrot; ...
Probe [tv]
US tv series (1988). MCA Television for ABC-TV. Created by Isaac Asimov and William Link. Executive Producer: Michael I Wagner. Directors included Rob Bowman, Robert Iscove, Vincent McEveety and Virgil W Vogel. Writers included Asimov, Wagner, James L Novack and Michael Piller. Cast includes Ashley Crow, Jon Cypher, Clive Revill and Parker Stevenson. Two-hour pilot film plus six 45-minute episodes. Colour. / Reclusive, socially awkward scientific ...
Lee, Thomas D
(? - ) UK academic, specializing in Arthurian studies, and author in whose first novel, Perilous Times (2023), the Once and Future King's brother is awakened into the perilous chaos of Near Future Britain, where fantasy topoi (including dragons; see Supernatural Creatures) and Climate Change markers signal a use of ...
Sutphen, Van Tassel
(1861-1945) US author, who early focused on golf, as in The Golficide and Other Tales of the Fair Green (coll 1898); a later volume, The Nineteenth Hole: Being Tales of the Fair Green: Second Series (coll 1901), includes two tales of golfing sf (see Games and Sports), "The Greatest Thing in the World" being set in 1999 when the game fully dominates American life. Several of the tales assembled in The Gates of Chance (coll ...
Frewer, Ellen Elizabeth
(1848-1940) UK author and translator, active before the end of the nineteenth century; her translations of Jules Verne were fuller and less tampered-with than most other versions of Verne during the years she worked on his books. It has been suggested that her financial independence allowed her to be firm on maintaining the integrity of her work. Frewer's later life seems to have been lived in private. [JC]
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 ...