SF Encyclopedia Home Page Saturday 1 February 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.

The present encyclopedia was first conceived by Peter Nicholls in the mid-1970s and was published as The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: An Illustrated A to Z (1979; vt The Science Fiction Encyclopedia 1979).

Welcome to the Fourth Edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, launched online on 6 October 2021 as a direct continuation of the Third Edition, following the amicable end of our decade-long partnership with Gollancz and the SF Gateway.

Welcome to the fourth edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

Science Fiction Chronicle was founded in 1978 as a department of Porter's more elaborate (but since 1984 defunct) magazine Algol, and became a separate publication in October 1979.

Welcome to the fourth edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, the second to appear online. Our aim is to provide a comprehensive, scholarly, and critical guide to science fiction in all its forms.

With the release of the Fourth Edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, we have a new publisher and a new web server; but our long-familiar domain sf-encyclopedia.com is unchanged.

This edition of the SF Encyclopedia contains very many entries of both kinds [see links below]. The old distinction between terms and themes is frequently blurred – as stated in the introduction to the second edition, "A terminology entry is effectively a short theme entry."

Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. For convenience, the three relevant editions of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction below are listed as separate titles. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: An Illustrated A to Z (London: Granada, 1979) as General Editor with John Clute as Associate Editor [encyclopedia: hb/Chris Foss]

The term "science fiction" came into general use in the 1930s, an early appearance being in Hugo Gernsback's editorial to #1 of Wonder Stories (June 1929).