SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 13 June 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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Longyear, Barry B
(1942-2025) US author and editor who ran a printing company with his wife before beginning to write in 1977, beginning to publish work of genre interest with "The Tryouts" in Asimov's for November/December 1978. Before his 1981 hospitalization for alcoholism and addiction to prescription drugs – an experience which formed the basis of his non-sf novel Saint Mary Blue (1988) – he had already published prolifically, sometimes as by Frederick ...
Di Filippo, Paul
(1954- ) US author whose birth and continued residence in Rhode Island places him at the heart of the Boston-Washington megalopolis (see Cities) that has been his typical venue and focus throughout his career, which began with "Falling Expectations" for Unearth in Winter 1977. He has published widely since, with at least 200 stories appearing in a wide range of journals. Beginning with ...
North, Franklin H
(? -? ) US journalist and author of The Awakening of Noahville (1898) a spoofish sf adventure tale, almost certainly derived from Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), in which two vagabonds become the scamp hirelings of Carolus Rex, ruler of a Lost Race kingdom somewhere adrift of New Mexico. There is a Robot, and ...
Orbit
1. Seminal US Original-Anthology series edited by Damon Knight. Although Orbit was not the first such series, having been preceded by Star Science Fiction Stories in the USA and New Writings in SF in the UK, it was its extraordinary early success that precipitated the boom in such series in the early 1970s. It had a more ...
Time Loop
The theme of a closed loop in Time appears in sf in two distinct senses. A classic form of Time Paradox (which see) comes into being when the chain of causality eats its own tail to leave a circular sequence of events with no logical starting point, as in Robert A Heinlein's two famous examples: "By His Bootstraps" (October 1941 Astounding as by Anson MacDonald) and "All ...
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 ...