SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 27 April 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.
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Pickover, Clifford A
(1957- ) US scientist, journalist and author, best known for a wide range of nonfiction texts in which narrative illustrations from Mathematics and Biology and other sciences are used to stimulate the creativity and to awaken the urge to numeracy in his readers. These include Computers, Pattern, Chaos, and Beauty (1990) (see Computers), ...
Cavendish, Margaret
(1623/1624-1673) UK playwright, poet and author, much of whose life shared the turbulence of her times, who died as Duchess of Newcastle upon Tyne. At a time when books by women were mostly pseudonymous or appeared in pirated editions, she was one of the first British women to write and publish professionally under her own name. / Born Margaret Lucas, the youngest child of Royalist and Catholic landholders, she received no formal education but was a lady-in-waiting to Charles I's Queen, ...
Francis, Richard H
Working name of UK author and academic Richard Francis (1945- ), who added a fictitious "H" to distinguish himself from Dick Francis, the thriller writer. His first novel, Blackpool Vanishes (1979), tells the quirky, extremely English story of what happens when microscopic Aliens kidnap the town of Blackpool. In Whispering Gallery (1984) the Invention of a link between bacteria and ...
Dexter, William
Pseudonym of UK author William Thomas Pritchard (1906-1985), whose two sf novels make up the short Denis Grafton series, in which concerns about the End of the World through nuclear World War Three are articulated, fairly incoherently, via a metaphysical Space Opera plot. In World of Eclipse (1954), after life on Earth has been eliminated by a "thorium" bomb, a few ...
Sentinel Worlds
Videogame series (from 1988). Designed by Karl Buiter. / Sentinel Worlds is the name used by this encyclopedia to refer to a sequence of two Computer Role Playing Games set in similar, though probably not identical, Space Opera milieux. Both borrow design elements from Space Sims, as do several other contemporary games including ...
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 ...