SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 17 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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Scifi Dimensions
US Online Magazine featuring Interviews, reviews, articles and commentary and usually one piece of fiction posted per week, for which it paid up to professional rates depending on length. The site was run by John C Snider, Atlanta, Georgia and operated from February 2000 to February 2010. Initially it ran fiction solely by Snider himself but it soon welcomed contributions from others, including Kevin Ahearn, Steve Antczk, ...
Willett, Edward
(1959- ) US-born actor, journalist and author, in Canada from the age of eight; he has also written as by Lee Arthur Chane and E C Blake, and under the House Name Adam Blade. He began to publish work of genre interest with "The Rescue" in JAM for 1983, and began to release primarily Young Adult novels, several of them fantasy, with Soulworm (1997), an sf tale set partly in a ...
Kafka, Franz
(1883-1924) Czech author, a Jew who wrote in German, active for about a decade before 1914; he was a full tri-cultural inhabitant – a German-speaking Jew in Prague – of the cosmopolitan world that would eventually become Czechoslovakia (see Czech and Slovak SF) after the trauma of World War One, a civilization whose death throes began in 1938. Belying any sense that his outer life slavishly mirrored his ...
Jennings, Phillip C
(1946- ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Tadcaster's Doom" for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in May 1986, and who during the next few years published over thirty often pyrotechnical stories, several of which described our solar system dominated by "bugs" – personalities in electronic storage (see Computers; Hive Minds). Some of the ...
Keyes, Thom
Working name of US-born screenwriter and author Thomas Francis Keyes (1942-?1995), raised in the UK but also active in Hollywood, who began to publish work of genre interest with "Period of Gestation" for Science Fantasy #67, September/October 1964. He also scripted an episode of Space: 1999 in 1976. Of his novels, All Night Stand (1966) is a hyperbolic rock-band novel that verges on the fantastic; ...
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 ...