SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 11 March 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 9 March 2026
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Mella, John
(circa 1942-2012) US editor – founder of Light: A Quarterly of Light Verse in 1992, which he edited until his death – and author. Transformations (fixup 1975) is an Alternate-History tale about the quest for a transvestite actor, set in a nineteenth- and twentieth-century USA and Europe transfigured by Time Distortions (the narrator, WS or William ...
Hall, Norman
(1904-? ) Author whose single sf novel for Robert Hale Limited was Green Hailstones (1978). [DRL]
McElroy, John
(1846-1929) US printer, publisher, journalist and author most famous for the nonfiction Andersonville: A Story of Rebel Military Prisons: Fifteen Months a Guest of the So-called Southern Confederacy: A Private Soldier's Experience in Richmond, Andersonville, Savannah, Millen, Blackshear, and Florence (1879), an extremely influential first-person account. Of sf interest is ...
Aelita
Film (1924). Mezhrabpom. Directed by Yakov A Protazanov. Written be Fyodor Otzep, Alexei Faiko, based on Aelita (1922) by Alexei Tolstoy. Cast includes Igor Ilinski, Yulia Solntseva and Nikolai M Tseretelli. 78 minutes cut from 120 minutes. Black and white. / This striking example of early sf Cinema is a satiric comedy in which a group of Soviet astronauts travel to Mars, where they ...
Davis, Nathan, Capt
US author (? - ) of whom nothing is known – it is possible he is either a descendant of the Captain Nathan Davis (? -1844) from Virginia who served in the War of 1812, or borrowed his name – beyond his authorship of a Utopia, Beulah: Or, A Parable of Social Regeneration (1904), which posits a future based on Christian socialism. [JC]
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 ...