SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 27 May 2022
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.
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Hill, Douglas
(1935-2007) Canadian-born author and editor, in the UK from 1959; in 2007 he was run over by a bus. Most of his early books were nonfiction, The Supernatural (1965) with Pat Williams, and Magic and Superstition (1968) being of interest to a genre audience. His involvement in sf and fantasy began through his editing of anthologies like Window on the Future: Science Fiction Stories (anth 1966), Way of the Werewolf: An Anthology of Horror Stories (anth 1966) and The Shape of Sex to Come (anth ...
Schwarz-Bart, André
(1928-2006) French author, married to Simone Schwarz-Bart; his parents were murdered by the Nazis in World War Two, and he subsequently joined the Resistance; his writing career was dominated by these experiences, his most famous novel being Le Dernier des Justes (1959; trans Stephen Becker as The Last of the Just 1960), a fantasy following over eight centuries the lives of the "Just Men" of one family, these being designated humans whose existence justifies God's sufferance. The last of these ...
Funkadelic
George Clinton's musical collective. Some consider it ineligible to consider Funkadelic as separate from Parliament, Clinton's other famous band, although the origins of the two are separate (Funkadelic was originally the backing group for "the Parliaments", as Parliament were originally called). Legal difficulties led to Parliament becoming subsumed entirely within Funkadelic by 1968, although these difficulties were cleared away by the early 1970s and Parliament released independently ...
Meyer, J A
(? - ) Author of a few solo short stories beginning with "Guess Again" (May 1951 Astounding), and two collaborations with Alan E Nourse: the short "The Sign of the Tiger" (May 1958 Amazing) which was expanded as the sf novel The Invaders Are Coming! (May 1958 Amazing as "The Sign of the Tiger"; 1959; vt The Sign of the Tiger 2011). This novel is set in an isolationist future America thrown into turmoil by the theft of nuclear fuel from an atomic plant, ...
Locke, Richard Adams
(1800-1871) UK-born journalist, editor and customhouse official in later years, in the US from 1832, now universally regarded as author of the famous "Great Moon Hoax". Beginning on 21 August 1835, several issues of the New York Sun carried articles purporting to describe the inhabitants of the Moon and their environs, culminating on 30 August with a description of the "Temple of the Moon", where lunar natives known as Man-bats (see Life on Other Worlds) were seen to congregate; all these ...
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 ...