SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 8 July 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 7 July 2025
Sponsor of the day: The League of Fan Funds
Found Footage
A term infelicitously but irreversibly appropriated since 1999 to denote fictional feature films, particularly in Horror genres, which emulate venerable epistolary and documentary modes of textuality by using elements of non-fiction film form and simulated amateur-video footage. (Previously the term had marked a class of documentary film distinguished by the incorporation of archive and amateur footage into an assembled feature with or without commentary, a ...
Chaplin, Sid
(1916-1986) UK coal miner and, from 1946, respected author of novels mostly set in the industrial north of England; in his Near Future sf novel, Sam in the Morning (1965), London is dominated – it is an argument typical of modern Horror's take on industrial society – by a sewage company which has used unknown Technology to strip Britain clean of ...
Mårtensson, Bertil
(1945-2018) Swedish philosopher and author. Mårtensson began reading sf in the mid-1950s, became active in Swedish sf Fandom in 1962 and published his first professional story: "Urhemmet" ["Original Home"] in the sf magazine Häpna! for December 1963. An extremely active fan, he edited numerous Fanzines during the 1960s and again in the 1990s, contributed stories, poetry, ...
Dold, Douglas
(1888-1931) US editor and author, elder brother of Elliott Dold, with whom in 1915 he joined the Serbian army. As a result of injuries sustained in combat, he gradually became blind, but this affliction did not prevent him from editing The Danger Trail magazine, presiding over Clues, Incorporated (which published Clues: A Magazine of Detective Stories), or publishing several borderline sf/adventure tales. The last of these appears to have been ...
Venturini, Fred
(1980- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Threshold" (in Sick Things: An Anthology of Extreme Creature Horror, anth 2010, edited by Cheryl Mullenax), and whose Young Adult first novel, The Samaritan (2011; vt The Heart Does Not Grow Back 2014), also makes use of Horror in SF tropes to give verisimilitude to the story of a highschool ...
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 ...