SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 31 October 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.
Site updated on 26 October 2026
Sponsor of the day: Paul Giamatti
Mesa of Lost Women
Film (1953; vt Attack of the Spider Women). Ron Ormond Productions/Howco Productions, Inc. Executive producer Joy N Houck. Produced by Melvin Gordon. Directed by Ron Ormond and Herbert Tevos. Written by Tevos and Orville H Hampton (uncredited). Cast includes George Barrows, Jackie Coogan, Dolores Fuller (credited as Delores Fuller), Paula Hill (credited as Mary Hill), Robert Knapp, Nico Lek, Chris-Pin Martin, John Martin, Allan Nixon, Tandra Quinn, Angelo Rossitto, Harmon Stevens, ...
Fantastika
A convenient shorthand term employed and promoted by John Clute since 2007 to describe the armamentarium of the fantastic in literature as a whole, encompassing Science Fiction (as addressed in this encyclopedia under many headings, including Genre SF, Scientific Romance and, less frequently, Speculative Fiction), ...
Phillifent, John T
(1916-1976) UK electrical engineer and author of much sf and works in other genres; though he claimed to reserve his best material for publication under his own name; he was, however, probably better known under his pseudonym John Rackham, the name he used for most of his work. [Phillifent and Rackham titles are separated in the Checklist below]. He began writing sf with the Space Puppet series for Pearson's ...
Wehrstein, Karen
(1961- ) Canadian author who began publishing work of genre interest with "O.R.3" in Shivers: Canadian Tales of the Supernatural (anth 1990) edited by Greg Ioannou and Lynne Missen. She has contributed three titles to Fifth Millenium, a Shared World fantasy sequence devised and controlled by S M Stirling (for titles see Checklist). [JC]
Science Fantasy
In the Terminology of sf readers, and more especially publishers, this term in its usual sense of something distinct or partly distinct from Science Fiction has never been clearly defined, though Joseph M Crawford, James J Donahue and Donald M Grant, in their "333": A Bibliography of the Science-Fantasy Novel (1953 chap), attempted without much luck to establish it as an ...
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 ...