SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 10 June 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 8 June 2026
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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Watkins, Peter
(1935-2025) UK Television and film director, active as a maker of documentary films from 1959. He was one of the pioneers of the technique of staging historical or imaginary events as if they were contemporary and undergoing television-news coverage, making his reputation with two quasidocumentaries or "docudramas" for BBC TV: Culloden (1964), in which participants at the Battle of Culloden in 1746 are interviewed by modern journalists; and ...
Asimov's SF Adventure Magazine
US sf and fantasy magazine, a companion to Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (see Asimov's Science Fiction) issued in letter-size semi-Slick format and published quarterly, four issues, Fall 1978 to Fall 1979. Following the success of the original Star Wars film Star Wars (1977), Asimov's SF Adventure was aimed at a younger, less ...
Ellison, Nina E
(? -? ) US author whose novel, Nadine: A Romance of Two Lives (1897), complicatedly (but competently) interweaves North American travelogue (much enjoyed by the eponymous heroine of the tale), arguments on Economic developments and possibilities in America, along with an sf narrative where an Invention, an electric thought-reading machine, helps solve a murder at the climax of a courtroom ...
Cartier, Edd
Working name of US illustrator Edward Daniel Cartier (1914-2008). After graduating in 1936 from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, Cartier was hired by Street & Smith to work on their Pulp magazines, notably The Shadow (see The Shadow). His skills were noticed by John W Campbell Jr, who began using him in the new magazine ...
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 ...