SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 5 June 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.
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Russell, Alan K
Pseudonym of UK publisher and anthologist Lionel Leventhal (1937- ), founder or co-founder of several firms, including Arms and Armour Press and Greenhill Press; at one point he also controlled Lund Humphries Publishing and Chatham Publishing. Leventhal is of genre interest for the Anthologies listed below, all reproduced from the original illustrated magazines, and all edited as by Alan K Russell; he also signed some material as by A ...
Red Shirts
An initially joky but now often seriously used item of critical Terminology, based on fans' frequent observation that red-shirted security officers in the original Star Trek (1966-1969) tended to be rather quickly killed off. Thus a red shirt, or redshirt, is an expendable spear-carrier who does not survive for long. As with virtually every aspect of Star Trek, this trope is sent up in ...
Frankenstein Monster
The term is in general use, not only in sf Terminology but in common parlance, to mean a Monster that ultimately turns and rends its irresponsible creator. Readers of sf are aware that in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley original novel, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1811; rev 1831), Frankenstein was the name of the creator and not of the monster; in popular ...
Ball, Frank P
(1908-1970) US solicitor, publisher and author whose self-published Utopia, My Wondrous Dream (1923), may be set in Atlantis, as its protagonist falls asleep while reading Ignatius Donnelly's Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882), though his adventures soon depart radically from any Donnellian hypothesis, taking off from Jonathan ...
Pepper, Frank S
(1910-1988) UK author, mostly for comics and boys' papers, perhaps best known for the Captain Condor series of adventures (23 February 1952-18 May 1974 the Lion), not all episodes being by Pepper. Big Deep (1977 chap) is a Young Adult sf novel in which radiation-caused Pollution creates Mutant Monsters ...
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 ...