SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 30 March 2023
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 29 March 2023
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Brown, Eric
(1960-2023) UK author who began publishing sf – after a children's play, Noel's Ark (1982 chap) – with "Krash-Bangg Joe and the Pineal-Zen Equation" for Interzone in Autumn 1987; like several further tales assembled in The Time-Lapsed Man and Other Stories (coll 1990), it is set in a future world dominated by the effects of bio-engineering and dense with information. This marriage of Cordwainer ...
Foote, Bud
(1930-2005) Scholar, political activist and music enthusiast; Professor Emeritus at the Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Literature, Communication and Culture from 1957-1999 and co-ordinator of one of the first university-level sf courses in America. He is the author of The Connecticut Yankee in the Twentieth Century: Travel to the Past in Science Fiction (1991), which argues that Mark Twain's ...
Hargreaves, Gerald
(1881-1972) UK politician, judge, composer, playwright and author, in active service during World War One. He is of some sf interest for his only published play, Atalanta: A Story of Atlantis: A Fantasy with Music (1948) as by His Honour Judge Sir Gerald Hargreaves (see Atlantis), a musical drama based, according to his introduction, on Plato's Critias (circa 350 BCE) ...
Seymour, John
(1914-2004) UK farmer and author almost all of whose works, from the early 1950s until his death, are nonfiction discussing the disappearance of what he deemed to be a balanced world (see Ecology), and the prospects of achieving sustainability in the future (see Futures Studies). Of sf interest is Die Lerchen singen so schön ["The Larks They Sang Melodious"] (1982), portraying ...
Blackford, Russell
(1954- ) Australian author and critic. The best of his small output of sf may be "Glass Reptile Breakout" (in Strange Attractors, anth 1985, ed Damien Broderick), the title story of Glass Reptile Breakout (anth 1990) edited by Van Ikin, a Cyberpunk tale of self-healing teenagers. His only novel, The Tempting of the Witch King (1983), ...
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 ...