SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 5 October 2023
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 3 October 2023
Sponsor of the day: Ansible Editions
Charteris, Leslie
(1907-1993) US author born as Leslie Charles Bowyer Yin in Singapore, educated in the UK; he legally changed his name to Leslie Charteris in 1928, and became a US citizen in 1946. He remains known almost exclusively for the long picaresque crime/thriller sequence featuring Simon Templar alias The Saint. This saga began with the author's second novel Meet the Tiger! (1928; vt The Saint Meets the Tiger 1940), though Charteris experimented with and discarded ...
Morris, Wright
(1910-1998) US photographer and author whose first books were "photo-texts" combining photos and fiction; in his later career he won the National Book Award twice, for The Field of Vision (1956) and Plains Song for Female Voices (1980). Of sf interest is The Fork River Space Project: A Novel (1977), in which something like the Near Future world, in the form of UFOs, interpenetrates a dreamlike ...
Crowley, Nate
(? - ) UK author whose sf series, The Schneider Wrack Chronicles, comprises two short novels plus a previously unpublished tale, all assembled as The Death and Life of Schneider Wrack (omni 2017). The protagonist, a criminal who has been executed and reanimated as a Zombie, finds himself indentured on a vast ship on the planet Ocean, where he is part of a crew hunting whale-like ...
Townsend, John
(1924- ) UK author of the Andy and Tom series of Children's SF Space Operas comprising The Rocket-Ship Saboteurs (1959) and A Warning to Earth (1960). He should not be confused with John Rowe Townsend. [JC]
Miller, Russ
(? - ) US author of The Impossible Transplant (1972), a mildly pornographic sf tale in which Sex and medical experimentation are joined. [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 ...