SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 14 February 2025
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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Moore, Chris
(1947-2025) Prolific UK artist, known to the public primarily for his hard-edged treatment of Hard SF subjects, although in fact he produced covers in different styles for all sorts of other genres as well, including illustrations of record sleeves for artists as diverse as Rod Stewart, Fleetwood Mac, Status Quo and Pentangle. What impressed most about Moore's sf art was not just the photographic realism but the sense of scale, achieved largely through a ...
Hawkins, Willard E
(1887-1970) US editor and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Dead Man's Tale" for Weird Tales in 1923, and whose Castaways of Plenty: A Parable of our Times (1935) is an anti-capitalist Satire set in the Near Future. He continued to publish stories until 1952, the most notable of these perhaps being Look to the Stars (October 1950 ...
Superman [character]
1. US Comic strip created by writer Jerry Siegel (1914-1996) and artist Joe Shuster (1914-1992), loosely inspired by Philip Wylie's Gladiator (1930), which Siegel had reviewed in his fanzine, Science-Fiction, in 1932. He was an sf fan, creator of several early Fanzines, including Science Fiction (5 issues from October 1932), in which ...
Rice, Anne
Working name of US author Howard Allen Frances O'Brien Rice (1941-2021), mother of Christopher Rice; her career as a prominent and esteemed producer of fantasy and horror fiction began with the first volume of the Vampire Chronicles sequence, Interview with the Vampire (1976), whose depiction of Vampire culture, and of individual vampire Antiheroes, proved very significant for ...
Delius, Anthony
(1916-1989) South African poet (see Poetry) and author who eventually moved, after much political pressure because of his anti-apartheid views, to the UK, remaining there from 1967. His Satire on South African Politics and apartheid, The Last Division (1959), sends a 1980s Union Parliament to a Hell and Devil closely resembling those in Wyndham Lewis's ...
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 ...