SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 12 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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Old Dark House, The
US letter-size saddle-stapled Cinema Fanzine printed on newsprint. Publisher and editor: George LaVoo. Two numbered issues, 1976 and 1977. / This short-lived Monster Movies magazine showed potential and is of some interest despite its swift failure. The second issue carried a lengthy cover story on The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). ...
Fairburn, Edwin
(1827-1911) New Zealand land surveyor, painter and author whose sf novel, The Ships of Tarshish: Being a Sequel to the "Wandering Jew" (1867 [but see Checklist]) as by Mohoao, which may be the first published novel by a native of New Zealand, is a kind of Future War tale in which an English descendant of the Wandering Jew saves beleaguered Britain with his futuristic ironclads (see ...
Hood, Christopher M
(? - ) US teacher and author whose first novel, The Revivalists (2022), set in a Near Future world whose populations have barely survived a flu-like Pandemic escaped from melting permafrost (see Climate Change). Chastened small-scale relics, perhaps ultimately viable, of the old world do persist; but the protagonists, parents of a daughter who ...
Seed, David
(1946- ) UK academic and critic who has concentrated on the teaching of sf for many years (see SF in the Classroom); his books divide more or less equally between individual studies and strongly edited anthologies. His first work of genre interest is The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon (1988), a general study issued before Thomas Pynchon began to publish much more frequently ...
Talebones
US Digest Semiprozine published by Fairwood Press, Seattle by Patrick J Swenson and Honna Swenson. It was initially saddle-stapled but became perfect bound from #18 (Winter 2000). It ran for forty issues from Fall 1995 to Winter (December) 2009, plus an advanced "preview" issue distributed at the Portland "Westercon" Convention at the start of July 1995. It was ...
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 ...