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Thursday 13 March 2025
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 11 March 2025
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Westlake, Donald E
(1933-2008) US author, mostly of detective novels and thrillers, often humorous, under his own name and under several pseudonyms, notably Richard Stark; he won three Edgar awards, including a Grandmaster award in 1993. He began publishing sf – always of secondary interest in his career, though never carelessly done – with "Or Give Me Death" in Universe Science Fiction for November 1954, and assembled much of his short work in ...
Toombs, Alfred
(1912-1986) US author in whose Good as Gold (1955), a Satire set in Near Future Washington, District of Columbia, the Transmutation of gold, reversing the traditional alchemical process, produces shit. [JC]
Star Fleet Battles
Board and counter Wargame (1979). Task Force Games (TFG). Designed by Stephen Cole. / Star Fleet Battles was first developed as a game of tactical combat between starships in the Star Trek universe. However, the limitations of the licence under which the game is produced, and the extent to which the various themes found in the original material were differently emphasized by the game developers and later television ...
Eidlitz, Walther
(1892-1976) Austrian poet and author of an sf novel, Zodiak (1930; trans Eric Sutton 1931), which takes a dim view of the glorification of technical progress, espousing instead a youthful ascent towards a higher world governed on Pax Aeronautica principles (see also Transportation). [JC]
Bok, Hannes
Pseudonym of US illustrator, author, and astrologer Wayne Francis Woodard (1914-1964). Sf Illustration has had very few mavericks: Bok was possibly the most famous. He did not let editors and publishers dictate the way he designed his work, and thereby lost hundreds of commissions. As Brian W Aldiss notes in Science Fiction Art (1975), he was one of the field's "masters of the macabre", a stylist ...
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 ...