SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 14 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.
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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 ...
Lindelof, O J S
(1852-1917) US author of A Trip to the North Pole; Or, the Discovery of the Ten Tribes, as Found in the Arctic Ocean (1903), a Lost Race tale in which (as per subtitle) the Lost Tribes of Israel are discovered inhabiting an Archipelago (see also Islands) at the North Pole, where they have become beautiful of countenance and possessed of advanced Technology; ...
Fanzine
A fanzine is an Amateur Magazine produced by sf fans and increasingly defined by its focus on Fandom and individual fans rather than on science fiction or sf stories. The term "fanzine", first coined by Louis Russell ("Russ") Chauvenet (1920-2003) in the October 1940 issue of his magazine Detours, has since been borrowed and used by Comics collectors, wargamers, underground publishers, music fans ...
Wolfe, Humbert
(1885-1940) Italian-born civil servant, poet and author, in the UK from infancy, active from around 1915; he served in the Ministry of Munitions during World War One and in the Ministry of Labour in World War Two. The title poem in Shylock Reasons with Mr Chesterton (coll 1920 chap) uses the term "reasons" with some despair; a telling quatrain on the anti-semitism of G K ...
Herzl, Theodor
(1860-1904) Hungarian author, founder of Zionism in its modern form, perhaps most significantly in his nonfiction Der Judenstaat: Versuch einer modernen Lösung der Judenfrage ["The Jewish State: Proposal of a Modern Solution for the Jewish Question"] (1896 chap). The title of Simone Zelitch's novel, Judenstaat (2016), is taken directly from this work. / Herzl's fiction was also influential, beginning with the fictionalized ...
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 ...