SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 10 December 2024
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 9 December 2024
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Devolution
Sf is usually an optimistic genre, and stories of Evolution on the whole envisage humanity as slowly progressing to higher states. However, a persistent pessimistic note in Genre SF generally, and to a degree in mainstream sf too, has been to imagine the opposite, the devolution or degeneration of mankind. The note was sounded most famously in H G Wells's The Time Machine (1895), in which ...
Strange Horizons
US Online Magazine launched in September 2000, and published weekly ever since. Originally devised and edited by a team headed by Mary Anne Mohanraj (the first editor-in-chief) and Jed Hartman. Since then there has been a succession of editorial changes. Mohanraj stepped down at the end of 2003 to be replaced as editor-in-chief by Susan Marie Groppi with associate editors Karen Meisner and Brian Peters. Niall ...
Kelton, Aryan
Working name of US author Aryon Lewis Kelton (1892-1957), who also wrote as A Lewis Kelton; his sf novel, The Great Haddon (1933), features a psychoanalyst who uses his powers of Telepathy in an attempt to dominate Wall Street and to obtain Sex from unwitting female victims. An earlier book by Kelton, the nonfiction Power of the Universe (1929), argues that the human subconscious is more powerful than we ken. ...
Passingham, W J
(1897-1957) UK journalist and author, in active service during World War One, who wrote several science-fiction serials for the popular weeklies in the 1930s, none of which was reprinted in book form. Passingham's interest in the progress of science was evident from several articles he wrote for London weekly papers such as "Today's Sky-Baby May be Tomorrow's Flying Giant" (18 January 1936 The Passing Show), which ...
TV's Dynamic Heroes
US letter-size saddle-stapled Media Magazine. Publisher: Top Flight Magazines. Editor: possibly Donald F Glut. Two numbered, undated issues 1976-1977. / This short-lived title was one of several Cinema and Television-related publications issued in the mid-1970s by Glut in partnership with long-time fan and screenwriter Ron Haydock (1940-1977). Jim ...
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 ...