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 1 May 2024
Sponsor of the day: Handheld Press
Auster, Paul
(1947-2024) US author and translator who came to sudden attention – after years of unrecognized work, culminating in an undemanding Baseball mystery, Squeeze Play (1984) as by Paul Benjamin – with a series of Fabulations playing on detective genres and the French nouveau roman. City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1986), assembled as ...
Meeting, The
Ukrainian animated film (1984; original title Vstrecha). Kievnauchfilm. Directed by Mikhail Titov. Written by V Zayats. 10 minutes. Colour. / Two fishermen joke that a moving light in the sky must be Aliens: they are correct, for it is a spacecraft monitoring the Earth. Realizing they have been noticed, the aliens decide to investigate. Armed with the poisonous substances necessary for conversation – cigarettes and ...
Maloney, Terry
(1917-2008) UK illustrator, author, editor and amateur astronomer who saw action in the Spanish Civil War (British Battalion) and World War Two (Royal Corps of Signals). Early professional work included designing London Underground posters in 1946 and joining Frank Hampson's studio in 1950, during which brief association he worked on Dan Dare – Pilot of the Future for the Eagle ...
Randall, Robert
Pseudonym used on collaborative stories – about sixteen in all, from "No Future in This" (May 1956 Science Fiction Quarterly) to "A Little Intelligence" (October 1958 Future) – by Robert Silverberg and Randall Garrett. Silverberg was very young at the time. The most notable of these were the Nidorian series, ...
Froese, Robert
(1945- ) US academic and author whose sf novel, The Hour of Blue (1990), presents the strangely consoling notion that Gaia herself is beginning to respond defensively to humanity's rape of the planet, and that the (surviving) forests in Maine (Froese himself teaches at the University of Maine, Machias) are protectively transforming themselves. [JC]
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 ...