SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 17 February 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 16 February 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Village of the Damned
1. Film (1960). MGM. Directed by Wolf Rilla. Written by Sterling Silliphant, Rilla, George Barclay (Ronald Kinnoch, the producer), based on The Midwich Cuckoos (1957; rev 1958; vt Village of the Damned 1960) by John Wyndham. Cast includes George Sanders, Barbara Shelley and Martin Stephens. 77 minutes. Black and white. / In this faithful but pedestrian adaptation of Wyndham's novel, everyone in a UK village ...
Lucas, George
(1944- ) US film-maker. He attended the University of Southern California Film School and as a graduate student made an sf short there entitled THX 1138:4EB (1967), which won film festival awards. Working in 1968 as an assistant to Francis Ford Coppola, he made a highly praised documentary about the filming of Coppola's The Rain People (1969); then in 1969, with Coppola as executive producer, Lucas began a feature-film version, ...
Wade, Tom W
(? - ) UK author who published mainly with sf publishers John Spencer (see Badger Books) under various pseudonyms. As Victor Wadey he wrote two bad yet charming sf novels, A Planet Named Terra (1962) and its sequel The United Planets (1962). The distant planet confusingly called Terra is populated by the Reincarnations of people from Earth, notably Elizabeth I, ...
Martin, Philip
(1938-2020) UK screenwriter and author, best known for his creation of the crime series, Gangsters (1975-1978). He also wrote some scripts in the Doctor Who universe, as well as some Ties, beginning with Doctor Who – Vengeance on Varos (1988); Doctor Who – Mission to Magnus (1990) was based on his own unfilmed script from 1985. His collection of essays and ...
Williams, Paul O
(1935-2009) US poet – specializing in the haiku – professor of literature and author who won the John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1983, and who was known in the sf field almost exclusively for his Pelbar Cycle – comprising The Breaking of Northwall (1981), The Ends of the Circle (1981), The Dome in the Forest (1981), The Fall of the Shell (1982), ...
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 ...