SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 17 February 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 17 February 2025
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Moore, Chris
(1947-2025) Prolific UK artist, known to the public primarily for his hard-edged treatment of Hard SF subjects, although in fact he produced covers in different styles for all sorts of other genres as well, including illustrations of record sleeves for artists as diverse as Rod Stewart, Fleetwood Mac, Status Quo and Pentangle. What impressed most about Moore's sf art was not just the photographic realism but the sense of scale, achieved largely through a ...
Walker, Steve
(1956- ) UK playwright, poet, illustrator and author, initially best known for his Radio plays, almost all forty of them for the BBC, beginning with "Him and It" (October 1988 Radio 4), an exercise in Absurdist SF. Other plays of interest, several similar pushing Satire into the absurd, include "Journey to the Centre of the Earth" (28 December 1994 Radio 4), adapting the ...
Chambers, Whitman
(1896-1968) US screenwriter and author, active from about 1923, most of whose novels were Westerns or detective fiction; his Near Future sf tract, Invasion! (1943), is a Yellow Peril tale set in a World War Two Los Angeles (see California) invaded (see Invasion) by a Japanese expeditionary force ...
Watson, Tom
(1982- ) UK author whose first novel Metronome (2022) is set in a Near Future Dystopian UK where women have lost control of their bodies (see Sex; Women in SF); the protagonists, a young couple planning to conceive without permission, have been exiled to a northern Island. The focus on these years (see ...
Dark, Sidney
(1872-1947) UK journalist, editor and author of much fiction and nonfiction; his influence as a political commentator waned in the 1930s due to his early anti-fascism, and his excoriation of anti-Semitism as a moral and intellectual disease incited by governments looking for scapegoats. ...
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 ...