SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 17 February 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 16 February 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Quandry
US Fanzine (1950-1953), 30 issues, edited from Georgia by Lee Hoffman. Though undistinguished in appearance, Quandry was noted for the quality and humour of its writing; along with Hyphen, its influence on fan publishing is still remembered. Contributors included Walt Willis, Robert Silverberg, Wilson ...
Cope, Julian
(1957- ) UK singer-songwriter, formerly lead singer of The Teardrop Explodes, who has since the 1980s released a number of playfully apocalyptic albums as a solo artist. The song "Upwards at 45" (in Jehovahkill, 1993) is a psychedelic account of Alien contact. Autogeddon (1994) – the album takes its title from the poet Heathcote Williams (whom see) – envisions cars ...
Shimmer
US Online Magazine, semi-professional from issue #15 (Summer 2012), also available in print form for its first eighteen issues, though the print issues seldom sold more than 200 copies. It was published and edited by Beth Wodzinski in Salt Lake City, Utah, and planned as a quarterly from Autumn 2005 though it soon appeared only twice yearly from 2007 to 2013, and it was not until it shifted solely to online publication that it was able to appear bi-monthly ...
Griffin, Sarah Maria
(?1988- ) Irish author whose first novel, the Near Future Young Adult Dystopian Space and Found Parts (2016), is set in a transfigured Dublin, which has been turned into an oppressive Keep by the survivors of a great Disaster a century before. Now known as the Pasture, the diminished ...
Science Fantasy Film Classics
Letter-size saddle-stapled Cinema Magazine printed on newsprint-quality paper with some slick pages included. Editors: Irv Karchmer, then Bill Hulsizer. Publisher: Tandem Publications. Four issues from December 1977 to October 1978. Publication was roughly quarterly. / One of a number of sf film publications which appeared on US newsstands in the late 1970s when science fiction again became highly profitable at the box office, ...
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 ...