SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 17 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 17 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 ...
All-New Super Friends Hour, The
Animated tv series (1977-1978; vt Super Friends II). Hanna-Barbera Productions for ABC-TV. Executive Producers: William Hanna, Joseph Barbera. Creative Producer: Iwo Takamoto. Directed by Charles A Nichols. Writers included Willie Gilbert, Elena Lesser, Orville H Hampton, Duane Poole, others. Cast includes Norman Alden, Jack Angle, Michael Bell, Danny Dark, Shannon Farnum, Buster Jones, Casey Kasem, Michael Rye, Olan Soule and Liberty Williams. ...
Hall, Robert Lee
(1941- ) US author and high-school teacher whose first novel, Exit Sherlock Holmes: The Great Detective's Final Days (1977; rev 1977), purports to be a lost Watson manuscript telling more about the relationship of Holmes and Moriarty. As in David Dvorkin's later Time for Sherlock Holmes (1983), Time Travel fuels the plot as Watson plumbs the mystery of ...
Cobley, Michael
(1959- ) UK author long resident in Scotland. His first books, the Shadowkings trilogy beginning with Shadowkings (2001), were fantasy. However, the subsequent Humanity's Fire trilogy – comprising Seeds of Earth (2009), The Orphaned Worlds (2010) and The Ascendant Stars (2011) – is full-blooded Space Opera of considerable scope and ambition. Its starting ...
Caunter, C F
(1899-1988) UK aviator (he was a pilot with the Royal Air force in World War One), scholar and author of popular engineering texts from 1920; he also worked as an electrical engineer. The distressed protagonist of his one published sf novel, Madness Opens the Door (1932), is taken via Matter Transmitter first to the Moon and thence through interstellar space to an entirely new ...
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 ...