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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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Cawthorn, James
(1929-2008) UK illustrator, critic and author; he often used the working name Jim Cawthorn, though he also went by J Cawthorn or simply Cawthorn, and his name was sometimes rendered as Cawthorne. After he entered sf around 1954, his career was largely defined by his relationship with Michael Moorcock – the men quickly bonded due to their shared interest in Edgar Rice Burroughs – and they first worked ...
Denmark
Although one cannot really speak of a Danish sf tradition prior to the 1950s, quite a few Danish authors did write occasional sf works before then. The first such book was Ludvig Holberg's Nicolai Klimii iter Subterraneum (1741 in Latin; trans as A Journey to the World Underground by Nicolas Klimius 1742; reprinted 1974), which was among the earliest works in any language to feature a journey inside a ...
Gnosspelius, Staffan
(1976- ) Swedish-born illustrator and graphic artist, in the UK since 1999, active from around then. He has illustrated picture books to texts by Swedish authors (published only in Swedish); the books for which he is wholly responsible have appeared in English, beginning with The Tristan Story (graph 2004) whose young protagonist loses his "crying", which he must search for in the bowels of his uncle's car: a Little-Big quest into a huge world growing huger, ...
Rud, Anthony
(1893-1942) US author and Pulp-magazine editor whose first story seems to have been "The October Blight" in The Green Book Magazine for March 1918. He contributed sf to Weird Tales, The Blue Book Magazine, Thrilling Wonder Stories and others; typical of this work is his first Weird Tales story "Ooze" (March 1923 ...
Van Ronkel, Rip
The most common form of his name used by screenwriter Alford Van Ronkel (1908-1965). He is of greatest sf interest for co-scripting the screenplay for Destination Moon (1950). Other genre credits include Destination Space (1959), which he scripted and produced, and – one of his last films – The Bamboo Saucer (1968), for which he wrote the ...
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 ...