SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 22 April 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.
Site updated on 21 April 2025
Sponsor of the day: Joe Haldeman
Broderick, Damien
(1944-2025) Australian author, editor and critic; he had a PhD in the semiotics of fiction, science and sf with special reference to the work of Samuel R Delany. He edited four anthologies of Australian sf: The Zeitgeist Machine (anth 1977), Strange Attractors (anth 1985), Matilda at the Speed of Light (anth 1988) and Centaurus: The Best of Australian Science Fiction (anth ...
Mice
The rodents most frequently found in sf are Rats (which see); but mice, their less threatening relatives, are also involved in similar sf tropes. A mouse civilization on a lost Pacific Island is discovered in The Wonders of Mouseland (1901) by Edward Earle Childs. The Iconic cartoon character Mickey Mouse, dating from 1928, has occasional science-fictional ...
Perception
The ways in which we become aware of and receive information about the outside world, mainly through the senses, are together called perception. Philosophers are deeply divided as to whether our perceptions of the outside world correspond to an actual reality, or whether they are merely hypotheses, intellectual constructs, which may give us an unreliable or partial picture of external reality, or whether, indeed, outside reality is itself a mental construct. / Perception is and always has ...
Bywater, Hector Charles
(1884-1940) UK journalist and author of influential works on the military applications of sea-power, and of a Future War novel on the same theme, The Great Pacific War: A History of the American-Japanese Campaign of 1931-1933 (1925), which quite remarkably predicts a massive Japanese surprise attack and early triumphs, and an ultimate American victory, the latter due in large part to an inexhaustible supply of energy, once the American navy began to ...
Jackson, Steve [2]
(1953- ) US Game designer, author and entrepreneur, inducted into the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design Hall of Fame in 1982. Jackson (who should not be confused with the UK Steve Jackson) first worked in the games industry as a designer for Metagaming Concepts (MC), creating Melee (1977 MC) – a tactical Wargame of man-to-man combat which later became part ...
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 ...