SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 5 October 2026
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 5 October 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Expanse
US Semiprozine, published and edited quarterly from Baltimore by Steven E Fick, letter-size format, three issues published, #1 (October) 1993, Winter 1994 and Summer 1994. A professionally produced magazine with eclectic design (each story set in a different font), it was a good example of what computer-aided design could now produce. With an announced print run high for a semiprozine, Expanse began intrepidly, proclaiming in advertisements: "Tired of the ...
Great Wall, The
Chinese film (2016; vt Chang Cheng). Legendary East, Le Vision, Atlas Entertainment, China Film Group, Universal Pictures. Directed by Zhang Yimou, starring Matt Damon, Pedro Pascal, Willem Dafoe, Jing Tian, Andy Lau. Written by Carlo Bernard, Doug Miro, Tony Gilroy. 104 minutes. Colour. / In the eleventh century CE, William (Damon) and Tovar (Pascal) are the last survivors of a group of European mercenaries who have made the long journey to China ...
Woolfolk, William
(1917-2003) US Comics and Television writer and executive from 1941, and author who also wrote as by Winston Lyon. Most of his fiction, beginning with The Naked Hunter (1953), was nonfantastic. Batman vs the Fearsome Foursome (1966) as by Winston Lyon loosely novelized the film Batman (1966) (see Batman Films), the titular foursome being a team-up of regular ...
Marriott, Crittenden
(1867-1932) US author, a prolific contributor to magazines during the first quarter of the twentieth century. The Isle of Dead Ships (January-April 1909 The Scrap Book; 1909; vt The Isle of Lost Ships 1930), twice filmed as The Isle of Lost Ships (1923 and 1929), focuses on a well-organized Lost Race occupying a network of ancient ships at the heart of the Sargasso Sea; the ...
MacDonald, Robert MacLaughlan
(1874-1942) Scots author and prospector who spent some years looking for gold in Australia and New Guinea and has been wrongly identified as Australian. His Lost Race novels include The Moon God's Secret: A Tale of the Tropical Pacific (1905), in which white explorers encounter decayed relics of an advanced ancient race (see Devolution); ...
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 ...