SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 10 December 2024
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 9 December 2024
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Phillips, L M
(? -? ) US author who seems to have published only two novels, one of which, The Mind Reader (1896), is of sf interest as its hero has, and exercises, the power of Telepathy during his adventures in the American West. The tale eventually moves eccentrically into occult matters, touching on Theosophy en route. [JC]
Rhinehart, Luke
Pseudonym of US teacher and author George Powers Cockcroft (1932-2020), best known for his Dice Man books, a sequence beginning with his first novel, The Dice Man (1971; rev 1983); publicity for the novel wrongly described its author as a psychiatrist. The tale, whose protagonist is named Luke Rhinehart, dramatizes a philosophy of chance – with life decisions made according to a throw of the dice – which, given dramatic fictional form, leads to what might ...
Ford, Jeffrey
(1955- ) US teacher and author, most of whose work has been fantasy and horror (but see Horror in SF), though his intimately knowledgable and sophisticated use of the toolkits of Fantastika make it impossible to affix any dominant label to his oeuvre; his tales, mostly narrated by an immanent and sometimes visible Ford-like story-teller, permeate and are permeated by the conversant web (or mycelium) of the ...
Gearhart, Sally Miller
(1931-2021) US author of lesbian-Feminist works – including A Feminist Tarot (1976) with Susan Rennie – and former Professor of Speech and Communication Studies at San Francisco State University. Her first sf book, one of the most extreme of those that envisage men and women as effectively different races, is The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women (coll of linked stories 1980). It is set in the outlaw, all-women, ...
Science Comics
US Comic (1940). Fox Publications, Inc. Eight issues. Artists include Emil Gershwin, Jack Kirby, George Tuska and Bert Whitman. Seven comic strips and a two-page text story per issue, plus an occasional one-page strip of scientific facts. / There are seven series in each issue. The Eagle is a young Scientist who discovered an anti-gravitation fluid (see Gravity): when ...
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 ...