SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 25 September 2023
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 18 September 2023
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Eisenstein, Phyllis
(1946-2020) US teacher – in later years increasingly active in this capacity – and author, whose first sf story was "The Trouble with the Past", written in collaboration with her husband, Alex Eisenstein, in New Dimensions 1 (anth 1971) edited by Robert Silverberg. She and her husband wrote other stories together, and he was influential also on work signed only by Eisenstein. Her first book, ...
Theatre
Sf literature and theatre have much in common, as both rely heavily on the audience's imagination, yet the two forms have rarely been combined in a significant dramatic work. The principal reason seems to be a widely held assumption that the theatre, with its physical limitations, cannot plausibly present the fantastic vistas which sf writers envision. "Writing an sf play is a bit like trying to picture infinity in a cigar box," Roger Elwood declared in his ...
Morpuss, Guy
(1969- ) UK barrister and author in whose first novel, the Near Future Five Minds (2021), a kind of solution has been found to rampant Overpopulation: individual "Identities" are enabled to time-share single bodies, the resulting "communes" allotted a much increased lifespan, at the cost of experiences akin to schizophrenia. There are resemblances to Philip ...
Sociology
Sociology is the systematic study of society and social relationships. The word was coined by Auguste Comte (1798-1857) in the mid-nineteenth century, and it was then that the first attempts were made to divorce studies of society employing the scientific method, on the one hand, from dogmatic political and ethical presuppositions, on the other. Social studies in a more general sense have, of course, a much longer history, going back to Plato. Sociology and sf have a ...
Hightower, Lynn S
(1956- ) US author of crime novels, like the Sonora Blair sequence beginning with Eyeshot (1986), and of sf, primarily the David Silver/Elaki sequence comprising Alien Blues (1992), Alien Eyes (1993), Alien Heat (1994) and Alien Rites (1995). Except for the presence of an Alien sidekick, and plots generated by interactions between sleuth Silver and the Elaki, 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 ...