SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 12 July 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 7 July 2026
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Vulture, The
Film (1967; vt Manutara). Homeric Films Ltd/Ihod Productions Ltd/The Film Finance Company Ltd. Produced by Lawrence Huntington. Executive producer Jack O Lamont. Directed by Huntington. Written by Huntington. Cast includes Diane Claire, Broderick Crawford, Robert Hutton, Gordon Sterne and Akim Tamiroff. 91 minutes. Colour/black and white (see below). / US atomic researcher Eric Lutens (Hutton) and his wife Trudy (Clare) are in Cornwall for a vacation and a visit to Trudy's ...
Thorson, Alice Otillia
(1870-1929) US author of The Tribe of Pezhekee: A Legend of Minnesota (1901), in which Lost Race devices serve primarily to give depth to a local Minnesota legend. [JC]
Serviss, Garrett P
(1851-1929) US journalist, amateur (but knowledgeable) astronomer and author who majored in science at Cornell University, then studied law, and only around 1874 entered journalism, achieving some fame, writing as the "Sun's Astronomer", for a column on Astronomy in the New York Sun between 1876 and 1892. At the end of 1897 he was commissioned to write an unofficial sequel to an equally unofficial 1897 US newspaper revision of H G ...
Aratus
Pseudonym of the unidentified author (? -? ) of A Voyage to the Moon, Strongly Recommended to All Lovers of Real Freedom (1793 chap) a thinly disguised Satire on British Politics and society (see Sociology). Written at the time of both the French and American Revolutions and during the anti-radical administration of William Pitt the Younger, it is a polemic for ...
Frank Reade Library
US Dime-Novel SF series, letter-size. 191 issues (though #188-#191 are reprints of #1-#4) 24 September 1892 to 8 August 1898, weekly to 8 June 1894 (#82), biweekly from then on. Cost five cents. Published by Frank Tousey, Publisher, New York. (Partial reissue 1902-1904, partial UK reprint.) All issues were printed on very poor paper and seldom survive in good condition; the 1902-1904 reissue, with coloured covers, is sometimes considered more desirable than ...
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 ...