SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 9 July 2025
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 2025
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Read, Herbert
(1893-1968) UK poet, anarchist and prolific critic of art, literature and politics. His only novel, The Green Child: A Romance (1935) was inspired by the twelfth-century legend of the Green Children of Woolpit, two greenish-skinned children who wandered into a British village and claimed to have come from an underground world called "St. Martin's Land" [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. The novel is a ...
Betty Boop
US animated film shorts (1930-1939). Fleischer Studios. Created by Max Fleischer. Directed by Dave Fleischer. Animators include Willard Bowsky, Roland Crandall, Grim Natwick and Myron Waldman. Betty's voice actors include Margie Hines, Little Ann Little, Bonnie Poe and Mae Questel. In this period Betty Boop featured in 89 short films, including cameos; this excludes Yip Yip Yippy (1939), advertised as a Betty Boop film, in which she does ...
Johns, Clifford Royal
(? -2023) US engineer and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Dog Thinks Ahead" in Shimmer #3 for Spring 2006; his first novel, the Young Adult Walking Shadow (2012), is set in a noirish Near Future Chicago, a world where Memory Edits can be purchased on the instalment plan and users must pay in full (even if they do ...
Heartfield, Kate
(1977- ) Canadian journalist and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "A Pair of Ragged Claws" in Black Treacle for March/April 2013. Her first novel, Armed in Her Fashion (2018) is a fantasy set in fourteenth-century northern Europe involving revenants and Shapeshifters and strong women; an earlier novella, The Course of True Love (2016 ebook), is set in a fantasy world based ...
Cartier, Edd
Working name of US illustrator Edward Daniel Cartier (1914-2008). After graduating in 1936 from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, Cartier was hired by Street & Smith to work on their Pulp magazines, notably The Shadow (see The Shadow). His skills were noticed by John W Campbell Jr, who began using him in the new magazine ...
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 ...