SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 11 November 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 10 November 2025
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My Living Doll
US tv series (1964-1965). CBS TV. Created by Jack Chertok, also executive producer, Bill Kelsay and Al Martin. Produced by Howard Leeds; scripted by Kelsay, Martin and others. Cast includes Bob Cummings (episodes 1-21 only) and Julie Newmar. One season of 26 episodes, 25 minutes per episode. Black and white. / After his success with My Favorite Martian (1963-1966), Chertok came up with another sf comedy series. Centred on psychiatrist ...
Warner, Harry, Jr
(1922-2003) US journalist, author and sf fan, publisher of several Fanzines, including Spaceways and the long-lived Horizons, which appeared regularly in FAPA from 1939 until his death. He was noted for prolific writing of letters of comment to others' fanzines for most of this period. Warner also made several professional sales to SF Magazines in the 1940s and 1950s, beginning with the poem ...
Halsbury, Earl of
Working name and title of UK barrister and author Hardinge Goulburn Giffard (1880-1943), Second Earl of Halsbury; his father, Hardinge Stanley Giffard (1823-1921), the first earl, was British Lord Chancellor for seventeen years at the end of the nineteenth century; Giffard was in active service during World War One. His Future War novel in the form of a Scientific Romance, 1944 ...
Crace, Jim
Working name of UK journalist and author James Crace (1946- ), who began publishing fantasy with "Annie, California Plates" in The New Review for June 1974. His first novel, Continent (coll of linked stories 1986), is a Fabulation set on an imaginary southern continent in an otherwise present-day world; it won the Whitbread First Novel Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize and the David Higham Prize. Crace's spare narrative ...
Meme
Term coined by the biologist Richard Dawkins (1941- ) in The Selfish Gene (1976), denoting "a unit of cultural transmission", a pattern of information which – analogous to the gene in Biology – tends to propagate itself. The general concept had previously been discussed by the biologist Jacques Monod (1910-1976) in Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology (1971), and may ...
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 ...