SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 13 July 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 13 July 2026
Sponsor of the day: David Cowhig
Stow, Randolph
(1935-2010) Australian author, in England from 1966, whose novels tend to embed deeply alienated protagonists into venues – some remote, some distressingly intimate for Australians, as in Midnite: The Story of a Wild Colonial Boy (1967) – which are described with anthropological precision, resulting in tales like The Suburbs of Hell (1984), which, whether non-genre or sf/fantasy, verge constantly upon fable. In ...
Pickover, Clifford A
(1957- ) US scientist, journalist and author, best known for a wide range of nonfiction texts in which narrative illustrations from Mathematics and Biology and other sciences are used to stimulate the creativity and to awaken the urge to numeracy in his readers. These include Computers, Pattern, Chaos, and Beauty (1990) (see Computers), ...
Garland, Mark Andrew
(? - ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Zen-Coding" for Nova Express in 1989, most of his later short fiction appearing as by Mark A Garland. With Charles G McGraw, he wrote a Science Fantasy adventure tale, Dorella (1992), set on a world where magic and Technology intersect; and ...
Hovenden, Robert
UK author, most probably Robert Meyrick Hovenden (circa 1809-1885), who published various books 1844-1876. Of sf interest is an unfictionalized Future History, A Tract of Future Times [for subtitle see Checklist] (1851), told as though written after 1950 and giving an accounting of the previous era, concentrating on the last fifty years of the nineteenth century, espousing a kind of benevolently anarchic ...
Phantom Empire, The
US Serial Film (1935; vt Gene Autry and the Phantom Empire); non-serial version as Radio Ranch (1940; vt Men with Steel Faces). Mascot Pictures. Directed by Otto Brower and Breezy Easton. Written by Gerald Geraghty, H Freedman and Wallace MacDonald, very loosely based on The Coming Race (1871) by Edward Bulwer Lytton. Cast includes Gene Autry, Smiley Burnette, Dorothy ...
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 ...