SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 4 March 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 2 March 2026
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
Grant, Rob
(1955-2026) UK author, initially best known under the collaborative pseudonym Grant Naylor for his work on the Red Dwarf (1988-current) Television series (which see for discussion). Only one related novel, Grant's solo Backwards (1996), has not been published under this name; as the title suggests, the central sf theme in Backwards is that of ...
Green, Joseph
(1931-2026) US author of sf and technical journalism who also worked for NASA, and who began publishing sf with "The Engineer" in New Worlds for February 1962. An Affair with Genius (coll 1969) assembles some of his better early work. Since 1989 he also published short fiction in Analog, F&SF and other magazines as by Francis Marion Soty. Although many of his 70-plus stories (not all sf) have ...
Simmons, Dan
(1948-2026) US elementary school teacher circa 1971-1987 and author, who began publishing work of genre interest with "The River Styx Runs Upstream" in Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine for April 1982, and who was for some time thought of primarily as an author of tales of Horror, some of which – along with sf and Fantasy stories – were assembled ...
McGuffin
A term devised by Alfred Hitchcock, who describes it at considerable length in François Truffaut's Le Cinéma Selon Hitchcock (1966; trans Helen G Scott as Hitchcock 1967), as an object whose loss – or rumours of whose existence – triggers the cast of a thriller or detective film into searching for it, or fighting for it, or running from it, but which has in fact little or no intrinsic meaning once the ...
Footprints on the Moon
Film (1975; vt Le orme; Primal Impulse). Cinemarte. Produced by Luciano Preugia. Directed by Luigi Bazzoni and Mario Fanelli. Written by Bazzoni and Fanelli based on the novel Las Huellas by Fanelli. Cast includes Florinda Bolkan, Nicoletta Elmi, Kalus Kinski and Peter McEnry. 96 minutes, sometimes cut to 83 minutes. Colour with black and white sequences. / Alice Crespi (Bolkan) ia a Portuguese translator living in Rome. She awakens one day to find that she has a ...
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 ...