SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 11 July 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 7 July 2026
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
Wright, Harold Bell
(1872-1944) US clergyman and enormously popular author whose only sf novel, The Devil's Highway (1932) with John Lebar, pseudonym of his son Gilbert Munger Wright, features a Mad Scientist and his culpable Scientist colleagues, whose Invention, a thought-control device (see also Psionics) operating with the help of a ...
Starhunter
Canadian tv series (2000-2001, 2003-2004; vt Starhunter 3200). SpaceWorks Studios/The Danforth Studios Ltd/Alliance Atlantis Communications. Created by Daniel D'Or and Philip Jackson for The Movie Network, Canada. Directors included François Basset, Luc Chalifour and Patrick Malakian. Writers included Julian Fikus, Peter I Horton, and Nelu Ghiran. Cast includes Tanya Allen, David Fournier (season 1), Paul Fox (season 2), Stephen Marcus, Murray Melvin (season 1), ...
Swirsky, Rachel
(1982- ) US editor, poet and author, focusing in the latter capacity almost entirely on work in shorter forms; she began to publish work of genre interest with "Scene from a Dystopia" in Subterranean #4 (2006). By 2013 she had already released nearly fifty stories, almost all of them bristling with transgressive "violations" of the genre purities of the previous century; her work represents a strenuous and at times stringent argument for ...
Yoshihara Rieko
(? - ) Japanese author and a key creator of the homoerotic subgenre known in Japan as shōnen ai ["boys' love"]. Yoshihara spent the first three years of her career writing straightforward homoerotic romance, before stumbling into sf, seemingly by accident, with the success of her signature work Ai no Kusabi (December 1986-October 1987 Shōsetsu June; 1990; trans as The Space Between ...
Galaxy E-Zine
In 1994 E J Gold, the son of Horace L Gold, the founder of Galaxy Science Fiction relaunched the magazine first in print form and then, from July/August 1995, as an Online Magazine. The mailing costs for the print version had almost doubled in the eighteen months since its revival and Gold, always prepared to experiment, wanted to explore the potential of the internet, especially since ...
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 ...