SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 19 July 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 14 July 2026
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McGrady, Rev T
(1863-1907) Irish-born Roman Catholic priest and author, in the US from early adulthood; in Beyond the Black Ocean (1901), a temperate Lost World within the Arctic Circle turns out to comprise an Archipelago (see also Islands) of societies, each founded by refugees from various countries in the outside world, strays from America inhabiting the island of Toadia, and so forth. The original ...
Westerns
The Western is dead: to begin with. In its pure form, unlike other genres of popular fiction, nonfantastic Westerns, also known as horse operas from the teens of the twentieth century, take place in a specific area or Zone of the world during the brief span between that point when whites began to conquer the Territory and that point when, fatally, they succeeded. The first Western stories, James Fenimore Cooper's nonfantastic ...
Adventures in Horror
US letter-size saddle-stapled weird fiction magazine printed on newsprint. Publisher: Stanley Publications Inc. Editor: Theodore S Hecht, anonymously. Seven issues, October 1970 to October 1971. Publication schedule, nominally bimonthly, was somewhat erratic. / A magazine of generally low-quality Horror fiction with a distinctly erotic flavour, with such lurid titles as "The Naked Slaves of the Master of Hell" (October 1970) and "Trapped in the Vampire's ...
Finder, Jan Howard
(1939-2013) US academic administrator, careers counsellor and sf fan, active in Fandom from the late 1960s, initially as an organizer of conferences (beginning with the J R R Tolkien-themed "First Conference on Middle-earth" in 1969) and Conventions; his Fanzine was The Spang Blah (20 issues 1974-1980). He published some short fiction including "The Grapes of the ...
Lie Detectors
Sf authors frequently invoke devices that can tell truth from falsehood a great deal more reliably than real-world polygraphs. The latter are anticipated in "The First Watch" (June 1909 Hampton's Magazine) by Edwin Balmer and William MacHarg, later included in The Achievements of Luther Trant (coll 1910), while their mechanical limitations are considered in G K ...
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 ...