SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 18 August 2026
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 17 August 2026
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
Crowley, John
(1942-2026) US teacher and author who also worked in documentary films and television for some time beginning in 1966. His sf novels have had a considerable impact on the field, and his fantasies established him as a figure whose work courteously but deeply stretched the boundaries of genre literature. / His first novel, The Deep (1975), is set on a flat discworld (see Flat Earth) resting on a pillar that extends beyond measurement into the ...
Norwood, Victor
(1920-1983) UK traveller and author who concentrated on Westerns and nonfiction works about exploration. Of some genre interest is the Jacaré the Untamed series of South American jungle adventure tales, loosely derived from Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan and mostly sf or fantasy: The Untamed (1951), The Caves of Death (1951), The Temple of the Dead ...
Eckstrom, Jack Dennis
(? - ) US author of whom nothing is known beyond his authorship of The Time of the Hedrons (1968), an unremarkable sf adventure. [JC]
Stone, Idella Purnell
(1901-1982) Mexican-born teacher, librarian, editor and author who also wrote as Idella Purnell, in US intermittently from before 1920, though she spent considerable periods in Mexico; most of her fiction was written for the Young Adult market. Of some sf interest are two tales with Lost Race implications: in Lost Princess of Yucatan (1931), two girls discover in a secret location lost Mayan artefacts, including an ...
Dumas, Alexandre
(1802-1870) French playwright and author, best remembered outside of France for romantic historical fictions, most famously the Musketeers sequence beginning with Les Trois Mousquetaires (March-July 1844 Le Siécle; 1844 8vols; trans William Barrow as The Three Musketeers; Or, the Feats and Fortunes of a Gascon Adventurer 1846), whose influence as a model for tale of adventure shared among companions is pervasive, and which directly influenced ...
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 ...