SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 15 January 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 13 January 2025
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Sacranie, Raj
(1950-1998) UK poet, journalist and author of a collection of short Space Operas, Stories from Outer Space (coll 1979 chap), none previously published. [JC]
Zone
Within the fictional worlds of sf stories or novels, whenever a space of some unusual properties is found, it can be defined as the zone. A zone's most characteristic feature is the way it differs from and interacts with the world around it. Sf most frequently depicts realities dissimilar to or even distant from that of readers' empirical experience, but no matter how surprising they seem, they are customarily based on a set of irrefutable yet decodable rules to be concretized in the course of ...
Nissenson, Hugh
(1933-2013) US author most of whose work concentrated on Jewish themes, usually centring on New York. He began to publish work of genre interest with "The Mission" (December 1964 Playboy), but his interest in sf was never direct, and only with his sixth work of fiction, The Song of the Earth (2001), did he return fully to the field; the tale is set in the Near Future, around 2050, when ...
Dung Kai-Cheung
(1967- ) Chinese author, and sometime university lecturer, who studied comparative literature at the University of Hong Kong, writing his M Phil dissertation on Marcel Proust. Strongly influenced by the Oulipo movement, Dung's work is thick with Fabulation, including evolutionary histories of non-existent species, descriptions of fantastic cities, and ...
Bill Haley and His Comets
US rock-n-roll band, founded and fronted by Bill Haley (1925-1981); also listed on releases as Bill Haley and The Comets and Bill Haley's Comets. Haley's former group The Saddlemen performed an early (July 1951) cover version of what many historians of popular music consider the first true rock 'n' roll song, "Rocket 88" (1951) by Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats (actually Brenston with Ike Turner and His Kings of Rhythm) – the title refers to the Oldsmobile car, ...
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 ...