SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 20 May 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.
Site updated on 20 May 2024
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Corman, Roger
(1926-2024) US film-maker, a number of whose films are sf. Born in Los Angeles, he graduated in engineering from Stanford University in 1947, and spent a period in the US Navy and a term at Oxford University before going to Hollywood, where he began to write screenplays; his first sale was Highway Dragnet (1954), a picture he coproduced. He soon formed his own company and launched his spectacularly low-budget career. From 1956 he was regularly associated with ...
Standiford, Les
(1945- ) US historian, teacher and author, his best known fiction being the nonfantastic John Deal sequence set in Miami. He is of sf interest for Spill (1991), a Technothriller featuring the loss of a deadly new biological Weapon and the conspiracy between its corporate manufacturers and the American government to conceal a Disaster which may bring about the ...
Glass, Matthew
Pseudonym of Australian-born doctor and author (1954- ), in medical practice in the UK for several years, whose first novel, Ultimatum (2009), is set mostly in a Near Future America where, by 2032, Climate Change has begun radically to affect coastal areas, with an estimated 25,000,000 citizens forced to retreat from the rising seas. These dire circumstances are soon submerged in ...
Reeve, James Knapp
(1856-1933) US author of The Three Richard Whalens: A Story of Adventure (1897), a Lost Race tale, in which the third Whalen searches for the Caribbean Island where the first Whalen had made a mysterious discovery, two centuries earlier. [JC]
Seymour, John
(1914-2004) UK farmer and author almost all of whose works, from the early 1950s until his death, are nonfiction discussing the disappearance of what he deemed to be a balanced world (see Ecology), and the prospects of achieving sustainability in the future (see Futures Studies). Of sf interest is Die Lerchen singen so schön ["The Larks They Sang Melodious"] (1982), portraying ...
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 ...