SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 15 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.
Site updated on 11 February 2025
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Moore, Chris
(1947-2025) Prolific UK artist, known to the public primarily for his hard-edged treatment of Hard SF subjects, although in fact he produced covers in different styles for all sorts of other genres as well, including illustrations of record sleeves for artists as diverse as Rod Stewart, Fleetwood Mac, Status Quo and Pentangle. What impressed most about Moore's sf art was not just the photographic realism but the sense of scale, achieved largely through a ...
Space Opera
A popular item of sf Terminology, echoing the practice (dating from the 1920s) of referring to Westerns as "horse operas", and more immediately the term "soap operas" (from 1938) for never-ending Radio series: when Radio was the principal medium of home entertainment in the USA, daytime serials intended for housewives were often sponsored by soap-powder companies, and hence the ...
Michael Moorcock & The Deep Fix
UK psychedelic-rock band formed by Michael Moorcock with Graham Charnock and Steve Gilmore, based in Notting Hill, London, and taking its name from Moorcock's story collection The Deep Fix (coll 1966) as by James Colvin. Their album New Worlds Fair (1975), released by United Artists, is set in a Post-Holocaust future and ...
Lieberman, Herbert
(1933-2023) US editor, journalist and author of several novels, most of which engage in scenarios involving flight and literal or metaphorical incarceration, but only one of which, Sandman, Sleep (1993), is sf. In the moderately distant Near Future, on a congested but psychically remote Island, a Mad Scientist father-figure conducts experiments in ...
Last Woman on Earth
Film (1960). Filmgroup. Produced and directed by Roger Corman. Written by Towne. Cast includes Antony Carbone, Betsy Jones-Moreland and Edward Wain (pseudonym of Robert Towne). 71 minutes. Colour. / For unexplained reasons (war?) the world is drained of oxygen for several hours; the lone survivors (as far as we know) are three scuba divers: two men (one wealthy and aggressive, one effete and intellectual) and the first man's wife. Scientifically ...
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 ...