SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 16 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.
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Salwowski, Mark
(1953- ) British artist. He moved with his family to Australia at the age of eleven, graduated from high school, and obtained two years of artistic training at college until a motorcycle accident ended his educational career. He soon went to work for a printing company, eventually serving as its Senior Product Coordinator, before going into business as a freelance artist. Returning to Britain in 1984, he began receiving assignments to paint sf and ...
Norris, Frank
(1907-1967) US editor and author of an sf Satire, Nutro 29: A Romance (1950), in which the Invention of a Food Pill, which eliminates any need to treat feeding the world as subject to considerations of scarcity, is received coldly by those in power. He should not be confused with the author Frank Norris (1870-1902). [JC]
Riesenberg, Sidney H
(1885-1971) US art curator, painter and illustrator, active mainly in the latter capacity from around 1905, his first work of genre interest being the cover for Harry Lincoln Sayler's The Airship Boys in the Barren Lands (1910), the first of several he executed for the Airship Boys series. During the later years of World War One, Riesenberg concentrated on poster art, mainly for the United States ...
Norden, Eric
(? - ) US journalist and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "The Primal Solution" in Cavalier for January 1968, in which a Jewish scientist develops mental Time Travel, inhabits the mind of Hitler and tries to get him to commit Suicide – unsuccessfully, creating instead within Hitler his hatred for Jews. Norden assembled his short work, including this story, in ...
Life on Other Worlds
Early interplanetary travellers invariably discovered worlds which were markedly akin to Earth. Without a theory of Evolution for a guide, let alone any but the most primitive awareness of Ecology, the imaginative creation of other-worldly life was inevitably a haphazard and arbitrary process. One notable exception is Johannes Kepler's attempt to imagine lunar life in the last pages of Somnium ...
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 ...