SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 17 May 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 16 May 2025
Sponsor of the day: John Howard
Fabian, Stephen E
(1930-2025) American artist, sometimes credited as Steve Fabian or simply Fabian. The self-trained Fabian first worked as an electronic engineer, but he began contributing art to Fanzines in the late 1960s and became a full-time professional artist in 1973. He did a number of covers and interior art for SF Magazines, mostly Amazing, Fantastic, and ...
Gawron, Jean Mark
(1953- ) French-born US academic and author, who researches in and teaches computational linguistics; his first sf novel, An Apology for Rain (1974), traces the travels of a woman in search of her brother through a surreal USA. It was followed by Algorithm (1978), in which complex Linguistic operations are used to structure the responses of a sidelined Earth to the greater galaxy, and the more conventionally ...
Science and Sorcery
Item of Terminology introduced in this encyclopedia for the genre-blending juxtaposition of sf and Fantasy settings, often presented as Parallel Worlds between which crossings may be made, and distinguished therefore from Equipoisal tales where any "crossings" tend to be integrated into the address of the tale, rather than working as transitions. (This use of crossings ...
Verhelst, Peter
(1962- ) Belgian/Flemish poet, playwright and author, active from the mid 1980s; at least two of his novels are of genre interest. In Tongkat: Een Verhalenbordeel ["Tonguecat: A Story Brothel"] (1999; trans Sherry Marx as Tonguecat: A Novel 2003), the titan Prometheus leaves his primordial world and comes to an unnamed Labyrinthine Near Future City ...
20,000 Leagues under the Sea
Film (1954). Walt Disney (see The Walt Disney Company). Directed by Richard Fleischer. Written by Earl Felton, based on Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1870; trans as Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas 1872) by Jules Verne. Cast includes Kirk Douglas, Peter Lorre, Paul Lukas and James Mason. 127 minutes. Colour. / This early Walt Disney live-action film set ...
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 ...