SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 1 May 2024
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 29 April 2024
Sponsor of the day: Handheld Press
Strobl, Karl Hans
(1877-1946) Austrian author, editor and publisher who sometimes wrote as K H Strobl; a war correspondent during World War One; once highly regarded for Horror tales whose influences included Edgar Allan Poe, such as "Der Kopf" ["The Head"] in his early collection Aus Gründen und Abgründen. Skizzen aus dem Alltag und von drüben ["For Reasons ...
Ballard, J G
(1930-2009) UK author, born in Shanghai and as a child interned in a Japanese civilian POW camp during World War Two. He first came to the UK in December 1945, and read medicine at King's College, Cambridge, but left without taking a degree. He began publishing sf with simultaneous stories in each of E J Carnell's two sf magazines: "Escapement" for New Worlds and "Prima Belladonna" for ...
McCollum, Michael A
(1946- ) US control-systems engineer (specializing in aerospace propulsion) and author, who began publishing sf with "Duty, Honor, Planet" for Analog, April 1979. His first novel, A Greater Infinity (fixup 1982), established the pattern he would follow through the 1980s: a complex Space-Opera adventure plot – assembling the variously published Greater Infinity stories beginning with ...
Gresswell, Elise Kay
Working name of Elizabeth Gresswell (1877-1944), née Kay, UK author whose Near Future Scientific Romance, When Yvonne Was Dictator (1935), concerns the election of the eighteen-year-old Yvonne initially as prime minister of the UK at a time of Economic disaster, and then, because of the power of her personality, as dictator (see Politics). In ...
Weird Comics
US Comic (1940-1942). Fox Publications, Inc. Twenty issues. Artists include Louis Cazeneuve, Dan Gormley and Don Rico. Seven or eight comic strips and a two-page text story in most issues. Weird Comics ran several series, each with its own creator – but these were House Names, the actual artists and writers would change, often leading to inconsistencies in art style, character, origin stories and setting. / Issue #1 ...
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 ...