SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 12 July 2025
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 7 July 2025
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Warhola, James
(1955- ) American artist, nephew of artist Andy Warhol. After obtaining a BFA from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1977, he moved to New York to pursue work as a commercial artist. He began his career in sf art with a clever cover for a 1982 edition of Philip José Farmer's The Book of Philip José Farmer (coll 1973), showing the author typing on Mars with Edgar Rice ...
Schmidt, Arno
(1914-1979) German translator and author noted for his linguistic innovation and the swift wit of his experimental fictions, which project an air of calculatedly cerebral quarrelsomeness; he repeatedly acknowledged the influence of Edgar Allan Poe, whom he translated, and whose speculations shape and dominate his most ambitious novel, Zettels Traum ["Bottom's Dream"] (1970). The marked and extremist manipulation of ...
Levy, Roger
(1955- ) UK dentist and author whose Reckless Sleep sequence, comprising Reckless Sleep (2000) and Dark Heavens (2003), depicts a deeply depressed far Near Future UK Dystopia in a state of imminent collapse whose population escapes all this, plus a succession of natural Disasters, via Virtual Reality constructs ...
Shippey, Tom
Working name of Indian-born academic and editor Thomas A Shippey (1943- ), in the UK from childhood; Professor of English Language and Medieval Literature at the University of Leeds 1979-1993; held the Walter J Ong Chair of Humanities at St Louis University 1993-2008. In essays and reviews, which he has been publishing since the mid-1970s, he takes a clear-headed orthodox view of the central figures of sf and fantasy; ...
Perimeter
Videogame (2004). K-D Lab (KDL). Designed by Andrey Kuzmin, Yulia Shaposhnikova, Michail Piskounov. Platforms: Win. / Perimeter is a Real Time Strategy game, set in a sequence of sub-worlds located in a region known as the Psychosphere (or, in a less felicitous translation from the original Russian, the Sponge). The Psychosphere is a separate layer of reality, one in which human fears and dreams become ...
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 ...