SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 17 February 2025
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 17 February 2025
Sponsor of the day: John Howard
Moore, Chris
(1947-2025) Prolific UK artist, known to the public primarily for his hard-edged treatment of Hard SF subjects, although in fact he produced covers in different styles for all sorts of other genres as well, including illustrations of record sleeves for artists as diverse as Rod Stewart, Fleetwood Mac, Status Quo and Pentangle. What impressed most about Moore's sf art was not just the photographic realism but the sense of scale, achieved largely through a ...
Carr, Jayge
Pseudonym of US author Margery (Marj) Krueger (1940-2006), a former nuclear physicist for NASA who began to publish sf with "Alienation" in Analog for October 1976, and whose major work to date is probably her first novel, Leviathan's Deep (1979), in which star-travelling Terrans (much like 1950s Americans, particularly in their sexual politics) confront a female from a technologically primitive but culturally sophisticated humanoid race whose males are ...
Clark, Thomas March
(1812-1903) US cleric (he was the fifth Episcopal Bishop of Rhode Island) and author of the Young Adult tale, John Whopper, the Newsboy (July-October 1870 Old and New; 1871) as Anonymous, in which the eponymous newspaper delivery boy falls through a hole into the Hollow Earth eventually reaching China. En route he visits the North Pole. [JC]
Westall, Robert
(1929-1993) UK art teacher (1960-1985), antique shop proprietor and author whose work, until near the end of his life, was usually for the Young Adult market or for younger children; from the beginning of his career, he was clearly at the forefront of those authors who had begun to respond to their audience's need for more direct confrontation with issues that concerned them. His nonfantastic debut novel, The Machine-Gunners (1975), which formed the ...
Icons
A number of historical, fictional and mythical characters have acquired iconic status in sf. Most such figures from myth and Religion have their proper home in Fantasy, but nevertheless appear repeatedly in sf and Science Fantasy – not only Shaggy God Stories but subtler rationalizations or reworkings of legend. In this category are ...
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 ...