SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 13 June 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 8 June 2026
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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Rue Morgue
Canadian letter-size saddle-stapled Media Magazine printed on newsprint. Publisher: Rodrigo Gudino as Marrs Media Incorporated. Editor-in-Chief: David Alexander. 1996-current. Publication was monthly to January 2005 and eleven times per year thereafter. / Subtitled "The Magazine of Horror in Culture and Entertainment", Rue Morgue now rivals Fangoria in popularity, being distributed throughout the world. Though focusing primarily on ...
Pickover, Clifford A
(1957- ) US scientist, journalist and author, best known for a wide range of nonfiction texts in which narrative illustrations from Mathematics and Biology and other sciences are used to stimulate the creativity and to awaken the urge to numeracy in his readers. These include Computers, Pattern, Chaos, and Beauty (1990) (see Computers), ...
Harney, Gilbert Lane
(1851-1925) US church minister and author of Philoland (1900), a Utopia set in a Hollow Earth venue, where a Lost Race of ancient Hebrews has established a populous civilization. It is a relatively sophisticated benign vision of a highly technologized Underground society; such visions are exceedingly rare after ...
Peterson, John Victor
(? - ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Martyrs Don't Mind Dying" in Astounding for January 1938, producing competent Genre SF for various contemporary SF Magazines until 1959. With Allen Ingvald Benson he published "Atmospherics" (September 1939 Astounding) under the joint pseudonym Victor Valding. In his one ...
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 ...