SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 6 December 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 1 December 2025
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Stoppard, Tom
Working name of Czech-born playwright and screenwriter Tomáš Straussler (1937-2025), in the UK since 1946, the Stoppard surname being acquired from his stepfather when his widowed mother remarried in 1945. His early dramatic work was characterized by extravagant wit and wordplay, and an Absurdist application of logic to surreal or insane situations. Following the broadcast of several Radio plays, his ...
Barbour, Douglas
(1940-2021) Canadian poet (author of at least fourteen volumes of poems, initially under the influence of Ezra Pound) and academic, a professor of English at the University of Alberta; his "Patterns of Meaning in the SF Novels of Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ and Samuel R. Delany, 1962-1972", accepted by Queen's University in 1976, was the first Canadian doctoral dissertation in the field of sf. A competent study of Delany was spun off from this volume: ...
Dehan, Richard
Pseudonym of Irish-born journalist, cartoonist, playwright, actor and author Clotilde Augusta Inez Maria Graves (1863-1932), in UK from around 1870; active from about 1884, her first plays being written later in that decade, as Clotilde Graves. Beginning with The Dop Doctor (1910), she wrote as by Richard Dehan; reprints of her work, including some titles originally published as Graves, continue to use the pseudonym. Of sf interest in Off Sandy Hook and Other Stories (coll ...
New Wave
This term, as applied to Science Fiction, is borrowed from film criticism, where it was much used in the early 1960s as a translation of the French nouvelle vague to refer to the experimental cinema associated with Jean-Luc Godard (1930- ), François Truffaut (1932-1984) and others. (It was also later applied to music around 1977 as a synonym for Punk.) The term was first used with reference to UK sf writers by P Schuyler ...
Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius
Animated film (2001). Nickelodeon Movies/Paramount Pictures. Directed by John A Davis. Written by Davis and David N Weiss & J David Stem and Steve Oedekerk, based on a story by Davis and Oedekerk. Cast includes Debi Derryberry, Rob Paulsen and Patrick Stewart. 79 minutes. Colour. / The usual pattern for Edisonade in Children's SF is that our young inventor (see Invention) must take many ...
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 ...