SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 25 May 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 25 May 2026
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White, Ted
Working name of US editor and author Theodore Edwin White (1938-2026), who also wrote as by Ron Archer, Norman Edwards and William C Johnstone. He was co-editor 1958-1969 of the noted Fanzine Void founded by Gregory Benford and Jim Benford. After working as assistant editor for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 1963-1968, he became the sometimes ...
Swift, Jonathan
(1667-1745) Irish satirist, cleric and poet, dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, from 1713, who began publishing with the relatively innocuous Ode: to the King on his Irish Expedition (1691 chap), but who soon composed A Tale of a Tub [for subtitle see Checklist] (1704) anonymous, written almost a decade before it was published. The book incorporated a second Satire, usually called today "The Battle of the Books", which used the imagery ...
Cárdenas, Juan
(1978- ) Colombian translator, editor and author, active from around 2005; he is primarily of sf interest for his third novel, Ornamento (2015; trans Lizzie Davis as Ornamental 2020), which is built around what happens to four separate women subject to an experimental study using a highly addictive Drug that affects women only. The doctor responsible becomes deeply involved with one of the experimental studies, who ...
Time
"Time," a character explains in Ray Cummings's The Girl in the Golden Atom (stories 5 March 1919, 24 January-24 February 1920 All-Story Weekly; fixup 1921), "is what keeps everything from happening at once." This enormously broad sf theme is dealt with under several encyclopedia headwords, of which the most important is Time Travel. Physical travel through time is ...
McGrady, Rev T
(1863-1907) Irish-born Roman Catholic priest and author, in the US from early adulthood; in Beyond the Black Ocean (1901), a temperate Lost World within the Arctic Circle turns out to comprise an Archipelago (see also Islands) of societies, each founded by refugees from various countries in the outside world, strays from America inhabiting the island of Toadia, and so forth. The original ...
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 ...