SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 12 February 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 11 February 2025
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Moore, Chris
(1947-2025) Prolific UK artist, known to the public primarily for his hard-edged treatment of Hard SF subjects, although in fact he produced covers in different styles for all sorts of other genres as well, including illustrations of record sleeves for artists as diverse as Rod Stewart, Fleetwood Mac, Status Quo and Pentangle. What impressed most about Moore's sf art was not just the photographic realism but the sense of scale, achieved largely through a ...
Academic Journal
In strict definition these are critical journals about science fiction, featuring no fiction other than as reference, published by academic establishments. By wider acceptance, however, these can include other critical Magazines produced within the science fiction fraternity which provide serious discussion and analysis of the genre to academic standards. / Academic interest in sf did not fully emerge until the 1970s (see ...
Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction
Black-and-white Comics-format magazine issued in 1975 by Marvel Comics through Magazine Management, which owned the company at the time. Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction was a high-quality production created by Roy Thomas and considered to be a continuation of his previous colour sf anthology comic, Worlds Unknown. The successor publication was equally short-lived, seeing only six issues ...
Cullum, Ridgwell
Pseudonym of UK traveller, rancher and author Sidney Groves Burkhard (1867-1943), mostly of Westerns from 1903. Of some sf interest are two novels: The Heart of Unaga (1920), which features a tribe of Native Americans who hibernate through the winter (see Suspended Animation); and The Vampire of N'Gobi (1936), a Lost Race tale set in central Asia featuring a ...
Edogawa Ranpo
Main pseudonym of Japanese mystery author Tarō Hirai (1894-1965), sometimes romanized as Edogawa Rampo, a name derived from the Japanese pronunciation of Edgar Allan Poe, who was his literary idol. An amateur translator of Arthur Conan Doyle during his studies in economics at Waseda University, Edogawa began publishing detective stories and macabre chillers commencing with "Ni-sen ...
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 ...