SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 13 May 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 12 May 2025
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Fabian, Stephen E
(1930-2025) American artist, sometimes credited as Steve Fabian or simply Fabian. The self-trained Fabian first worked as an electronic engineer, but he began contributing art to Fanzines in the late 1960s and became a full-time professional artist in 1973. He did a number of covers and interior art for SF Magazines, mostly Amazing, Fantastic, and ...
Pamela, Lucia
(1904-2002) US singer and bandleader. Her only album, Into Outer Space with Lucia Pamela (1969), on which she played all instruments (including piano, clarinet, drums and theremin), mostly in an old-fashioned swing style, was purportedly recorded on the Moon. The album begins with Pamela offering readers to take a trip to the Moon, where we meet Moon people and animals, and is bookended with "spacey" electronic sounds. Disappointingly, the songs in ...
Gillings, Walter
(1912-1979) UK journalist and editor, active in Fandom (where he was usually known as Wally Gillings) from the early 1930s; he published (1937-1938) seven issues of an historic Fanzine, Scientifiction. This activity led to his editing the first true UK sf magazine, Tales of Wonder (1937-1942); his use of the term "science fiction" on the cover of issue number one ...
Suzuki Izumi
(1949-1986) Japanese author who, at the beginning of her troubled career, quit her teenage job as a key-punch operator after a Fanzine story gained an honourable mention in a competition run by the literary magazine Shōsetsu Gendai. Moving to Tokyo in 1970, she moonlighted as a bar hostess, nude model and actress under the name Naomi Asaka or Naomi Senkō. Her husband, the saxophonist Kaoru Abe, died of a drug overdose in ...
Nebo Zovyot
Film (1959; vt The Sky Calls; vt The Heavens Call). A P Dovzenko Filmstudio. Directed by Mikhail Karzhukov and Aleksandr Kozyr. Written by Mikhail Karzhukov, Yevgeni Pomeshchikov, and Aleksei Sazanov. Cast includes Konstantin Bartashevich, V Chernyak, S Filimonov, Ivan Pereverzev, Aleksandr Shvorin and Gurgen Tonuuts. 120 minutes. Drastically cut with added footage as Battle Beyond the Sun (1962). / This unheralded masterpiece of the ...
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 ...