SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 18 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 17 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 ...
Unwin, Stanley
(1911-2002) South African-born broadcaster, comedian and author, in UK from 1914; best-known for his creation of a comically distorted version of English, a gobbledegookish patter not dissimilar to the effect of Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky", which first appeared in Through the Looking-Glass (1871). The Linguistic distortion is superficial but cumulatively compelling; through its mildly antic effect, a sense of an ...
Strange World of Planet X, The
1. UK tv serial (1956). ATV. Produced by Arthur Lane. Directed by Quentin Lawrence. Teleplay René Ray. Cast includes Helen Cherry, Maudie Edwards, David Garth and William Lucas. Seven 25-minute episodes. Black and white. / Scientists discover a formula giving access to the fourth Dimension and, with others, are thereby transported to the abstractly arid Planet X. Ray novelized her own screenplay as ...
Wylie, Dirk
Name adopted by Joseph H Dockweiler (1920-1949) – also known as Harry Dockweiler – a member of the Futurians fan group, for several stories written in collaboration with Frederik Pohl, with whom he set up the Dirk Wylie Literary Agency after the war (Pohl continued under this name after Wylie's fatal illness forced him to resign). C M Kornbluth also had a hand in one of these, "Vacant ...
Upload
This real-world term for the transfer of data to a remote Computer (for example, new or amended web pages to a website host) has taken on a special sf significance as denoting the copying or transfer of a human or other personality to a sentient software representation. Interesting early examples are "Ghost" (May 1943 Astounding) by Henry Kuttner and C L Moore, in which the ...
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 ...