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
Forbidden Island
Board Game (2011). Gamewright. Designed by Matt Leacock. / You are a band of intrepid adventurers in search of lost treasure, traversing a mysterious secret island. As you pull pieces of each treasure from the ground, the waters heave and shake around you.... Will you and your fellow explorers find all of the pieces, or will you sink beneath the treacherous sea? / Forbidden Island is a co-operative game for 2-4 players, with a loose ...
Out of This World [magazine]
UK Digest-format magazine published by John Spencer and Co; edited by Samuel Assael and Maurice Nahum. Billed as "bi-monthly" but two issues only, October 1954 and January 1955. / This short-lived weird-fiction venture from the Badger Books stable is principally notable for the fact that the entire contents of both issues – each comprising five novelettes ...
Dundas, Ever
(? - ) Scottish author whose first novel, the nonfantastic Goblin (2017), traces the picaresque life of its eponym from around September 1939 – date of the historical UK-government-induced pet massacre, executed in fear that feed would run short – and the present. Her second novel HellSans (2022), Satirically depicts a Near Future UK whose inhabitants are ...
Zago, Jungle Prince
US Comic (1948-1949). Fox Publications, Inc. 4 issues. Artists include Matt Baker, Jack Kamen and Bob Webb. Script writers include Myron Fass. 36 pages, with 3-4 long strips and a short text story, plus short pieces as filler. / Zago is one of the many Tarzan clones that populated this era's comics; he even has his Jane, here called Wana. #1 opens with Morris and Ellen, "a ...
Escargots, Les
["The Snails"] French animated film (1966). Société des Film d'Art et de Culture. Directed by René Laloux. Written by Roland Topor and René Laloux. 11 minutes. Colour. / This excellent, wordless short is in a very different style to Laloux and Topor's feature-length collaboration, La Planète Sauvage (1973). A farmer is unable to make his crops grow until he discovers ...
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 ...