SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 15 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.
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Thayer, Tiffany
(1902-1959) US actor and author, prolific and once immensely popular – his first novel, the courtroom drama Thirteen Men (1930), was reprinted forty times in twenty years; he also wrote as by O B King. After the success of Tiffany Thayer's Three Musketeers (1939), he devoted most of his remaining years to an enormous historical work, «Tiffany Thayer's Mona Lisa»; of its seven projected instalments, only the 1200pp The Prince of Taranto ...
Collectible Miniatures Game
Term used to describe a form of Wargame which uses miniatures collectible in the manner of a Collectible Card Game (see also Collectibles). Thus the figures are sold in packs, some of which contain rare items distributed at random; this practice encourages the purchase of multiple packs. Figures are sold fully assembled and painted, in contrast to traditional ...
Cowen, Laurence
(1865-1942) UK scriptwriter, playwright, film and theatre director and author born Laurence Cohen, who also wrote as by Lesser Columbus. His "Wake Up!": A Dream of To-morrow (3 January-26 February 1915 Daily Express; 1915) is a Near Future Invasion tale which avoids direct reference to World War One by giving the invading nation the imaginary name of Vaevictia; before its ...
Rådström, Pär
(1925-1963) Swedish author, essayist and journalist. His father was a novelist, screenwriter and editor of a short story Magazine; at 17 Rådström went to work as a journalist, and two years later began to write about jazz for the new daily tabloid newspaper Expressen. After the end of World War Two, he left Sweden to travel and spent much of the following decade abroad while producing innumerable articles, reviews, ...
Mayer, Douglas W F
(1919-1976) UK fan, essayist and editor active in the Leeds-based Science Fiction Association (SFA) in the late 1930s. Under the auspices of the SFA he edited the early Fanzine Tomorrow (seven issues, Spring 1937 to Autumn 1938); the three 1937-1938 issues of the Amateur Magazine Amateur Science Stories (which see), most noted for publishing Arthur C ...
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 ...