SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 29 September 2023
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 25 September 2023
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Atiyah, Edward
(1903-1964) Lebanese-born author in the UK permanently from 1945; his study of Jewish-Arab conflicts in the Middle East, The Arabs (1955), supplied arguments utilized (sometimes ruthlessly) by all sides in the long tragedy. He is of sf interest for The Eagle Flies from England (1960), an Alternate History tale in which Napoleon's parents emigrate to Britain in 1769; their son – displaying military and political genius ...
Night of the Carrots, The
Estonian animated film (1998; original title Porgandite öö). Eesti Joonisfilm. Directed and written by Priit Pärn. Narration by Frank Boyle. 29 minutes. Colour. / Diego, lover of the round, hater of the angular, arrives at PGI hoping to book a room. A sprawling, architecturally unappealing structure, PGI is a hotel (perhaps also a sanatorium) and, as the queues outside attest, much in demand: getting a ...
M F Enterprises
US publishing company based in New York City, founded and sometimes edited by the notorious Myron Fass, who had issued cheaply-produced magazines under various names and imprints in numerous genres since the 1950s. Launched in 1966, M F Enterprises produced a short-lived line of colour Comics including titles in the western and teenage humour genres. It is best remembered for an additional version of ...
Sutherland, James [2]
(1948- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "At the Second Solstice" in Clarion II (anth 1972) edited by Robin Scott Wilson; in his Near Future sf novel, Stormtrack (1974), astronauts manning a weather satellite must deal with the Disaster of a storm of unprecedented ferocity. [JC]
May, Peter
(1951- ) Scottish journalist, screenwriter and author, active from around 1970; in France from around 2000. During the first twenty-five years of his career as a screenwriter, he was involved in something like 1,000 television productions, all seemingly nonfantastic. He began to publish fiction with The Reporter (1978), which he serialized for the BBC; most of his later novels have been crime thrillers, including the China Thrillers beginning ...
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 ...