SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 21 March 2023
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 20 March 2023
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Recursive SF
Recycling material from the vast and growing storehouse of the already-written has long been a practice of sf writers. Plots and characters constantly reappear throughout sf, usually but not always in the form of sequels written by the author of the original work; venues (like Edgar Rice Burroughs's Mars) become universal props; and terms descriptive of devices or circumstances unique to sf (from BEMS to ...
Liston, Edward
(1900-1986) UK-born physician, flight surgeon and author, naturalized as a US citizen in 1932; in his Lost Race novel, The Bowl of Night (1948), a flight surgeon crash-lands in the Mexican jungle, where he discovers a Mayan civilization accessible only through passages Underground; the Mayans, though totally out of touch with the outside world, have developed science and Technology to ...
Harcourt, Glenn
(? - ) US author who collaborated with Carter Scholz (whom see for description) on his only sf publication, the novel Palimpsests (1984). [JC]
Fagan, Jim
(? - ) Australian author of Jules Verne's Rocket to the Moon (1967), which is Tied to the film of the same name (which see): Jules Verne's Rocket to the Moon (1967; vt Those Fantastic Flying Fools US; vt Rocket to the Moon). [JC/DRL]
Helix SF
US Online Magazine published by Legends Group, Gaithersburg, Maryland and produced by Lawrence Watt-Evans and William Sanders. A Semiprozine that made its material available for free but asked for donations from which authors could be paid, it ran for ten quarterly issues from July 2006 to October 2008. Its primary objective was to publish stories ...
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 ...