SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 9 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.
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Sarrantonio, Al
(1952-2025) US editor and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Ahead of the Joneses" in Asimov's for March 1979. Much of his work was horror, sometimes tinged with sf (see Horror in SF), including his first novel, The Worms (1985), a Gothic tale set in Massachusetts with hints of H P Lovecraft; and the Equipoisal Moonbane ...
Carnegie Medal
This Award for distinguished works written for children was established in 1936 in memory of the Scots-born industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919). Though not specifically a genre award, it has several times been presented for Fantasy and supernatural fiction whose themes border on or overlap Children's SF and Young Adult genre work, and in 2011 went ...
Searles, A Langley
(1920-2009) US Fanzine publisher and Professor of Chemistry at the College of Mount St Vincent, New York (he retired in 1987); as publisher from 1943 of Fantasy Commentator (which see for details), he maintained the journal as a significant forum for the study of sf in many of its aspects, though concentrating on early Genre SF. In 1999 he was inducted into the ...
Harrison, T Milner
(1865-1917) Canadian entrepreneur, almost certainly in Hawaii in 1897 where a Thomas Milner Harrison was involved in a firm engaged in selling the Hagey Gold Cure in Hawaii and the South Pacific, an enterprise which dissolved in litigation in 1902. As an author, he published one Lost World tale, Modern Arms and a Feudal Throne: The Romantic Story of an Unexplored Sea (1904), which moves from Hawaii to the South Pacific, where a great storm plummets ...
Immortality
Immortality is one of the basic motifs of speculative thought; the elixir of life and the fountain of youth are hypothetical goals of classic intellectual and exploratory quests. What is usually involved is, strictly speaking, extreme longevity and freedom from ageing, if not actual Rejuvenation – the uselessness of the former without the latter is reflected in the myth of Tithonus and in Jonathan Swift's account 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 ...