SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 11 April 2026
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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Pered pryžkom v kosmos
Short Russian film (1959; vt Prior to the Leap into Space). Ministerstvo Kinematografii. Directed by Viktor Morgenstern. Written by Vladimir Kapitanovsky and Vladimir Shreiberg. Actors unknown. 37 minutes; black and white. / This film, after being released in Russia in 1959 – the year shown in the credits – surprisingly received a US release with an English narration in 1961 (probably due to a new interest in the Russian space program ...
Priest, Cherie
(1975- ) US author who began publishing with the first volume of her Eden Moore sequence of Southern Gothic horror novels, comprising Four and Twenty Blackbirds (2003; exp rev Four and Twenty Blackbirds 2005), Wings to the Kingdom (2006) and Not Flesh Nor Feathers (2007); the series, circling around a young girl who becomes a woman while remaining sensitive to ghosts, focuses sharply on the complicity of ...
Mastai, Elan
(? - ) Canadian screenwriter and author, best known in the former capacity for scripting a romantic comedy, The F Word (2013) directed by Michael Dowse. His first novel, All Our Wrong Todays (2017), describes two Alternate History versions of recent history, one being our default world, which is here depicted as profoundly Dystopian for a range of reasons, ...
Payne, Paul L
(1921-1992) US editor and author, who edited Planet Stories between 1946 and 1950, and who published some Space Operas, notably The Cructars Are Coming (Summer 1952 Two Complete Science-Adventure Books; 2008 ebook), in which Martians (see Mars) are wrongly accused of causing mass deaths on Earth. [JC]
Koebel, W H
(1872-1923) UK author of The Singular Republic (1908), which describes a benevolent South American Utopia known as Neuvonie, where romance (and decimal currency) flourish, until fault lines in its trading relations with the rest of the world instigate a revolution, ending the experiment. [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 ...