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
Lindsay, Vachel
(1879-1931) US poet, the clanging visionary primitivism of whose best-known work – the poems assembled in The Congo and Other Poems (coll 1914) – may have been ingenuous, though the volume also contains "Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight" (21 September 1914 Independent), in which the president is awoken from the grave to mourn World War One and the future, which "breaks his heart". Some of the poems in Going-to-the-Sun ...
Brillhart, Ralph
(1924-2007). American artist. Although virtually nothing is known about this artist, there is a 2007 obituary for a Ralph Winton Brillhart of Great Neck, Long Island, identifying the man as a former Marine and "commercial illustrator", and one can reasonably assume that he was the Ralph Brillhart who painted a number of sf book covers for New York publishers during the 1960s and early 1980s. During the first phase of his career, Brillhart sometimes employed a realistic style that could appear ...
Rositzke, Harry A
(1911-2002) US CIA agent 1947-1970 whose professional focus on the USSR generated (post-retirement) nonfiction studies of interest, including The KGB: The Eyes of Russia (1980). Of sf interest is Left On!: The Glorious Bourgeois Cultural Revolution (1973) which describes guardedly the establishment of a Near Future populist Utopia in America. [JC]
Peyton, Audrey
(? - ) UK author of Ashes (1981), a dark sf tale for Robert Hale Limited which is set in an obscurely described world devastated by Climate Change. [JC]
Get Smart!
1. US tv series (1965-1970). Talent Associates for NBC-TV until 1969; CBS Television for CBS-TV 1969-1970. Created by Mel Brooks with Buck Henry. Directors included Bruce Bilson, Earl Bellamy, James Komack, Don Adams, Gary Nelson. Writers included Barry Blitzer, Joseph Cavella, Gerald Gardner, Adams, Mike Marmer, Leonard Stern, Chris Hayward, Arne Sultan and Lloyd Turner. Cast includes Don Adams, Barbara Feldon, Richard Gautier, Robert Karvelas, ...
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 ...