SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 10 July 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 7 July 2025
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May, Julian
(1931-2017) US editor and author, active in US Fandom in the 1940s and early 1950s; married to T E Dikty from 1953 to his death in 1991, founding with him Publication Associates in 1957 (see his entry for this and later enterprises); he also served as editor and agent for all her mature work. She began publishing sf with "Dune Roller" in Astounding for December 1951, a frequently anthologized story that was ...
Murray, Gilbert
(1866-1957) Australian-born classical scholar, in UK from 1877, best known for his many translations from the Greek classic drama, for his Utopian sense that contemporary society could be changed by persuasion (justified in the case of women's suffrage) and for seminal studies such as The Rise of the Greek Epic (1907) and Four Stages of Greek Religion [see Checklist for subtitle] (1912; exp vt Five Stages of Greek Religion ...
Allhusen, Beatrice May
(1853-1918) UK author who may now be best known for her long loyal friendship with Oscar Wilde; she is of direct sf interest for The Laws of Leflo (1911) as by "The Author of Miss Molly", an anarchist Utopia set in a kind of Lost World in Africa, where the precepts of its white founder lead to disaster. [JC]
Asteroids
The asteroids (or minor planets) mostly lie between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The first to be discovered was Ceres, identified by Giuseppe Piazzi (1746-1826) in 1801; three more, including Vesta and Pallas, were discovered in the same decade, and hundreds of thousands have now been catalogued. Only a few are over 150 km (100 miles) in diameter, the largest – Ceres, classified since 2006 as a dwarf planet rather than an asteroid ...
Gilbert, Stephen
(1912-2010) Irish businessman, journalist and author whose first novel, The Landslide (1943), is of sf interest, being a Parallel-World fantasy of some complexity in which primeval eggs, exposed by the titular event, begin to hatch into dragons; his second sf novel, Monkeyface (1948), movingly explores the familiar territory of the self-aware ape (see Apes as Human); his third, ...
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 ...