SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 29 September 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 28 September 2026
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May, Peter
(1951-2026) Scottish journalist, screenwriter and author, active from around 1970; resident in France from around 2000. During the first twenty-five years of his career as a screenwriter, he was involved in something like 1,000 television productions, all seemingly nonfantastic. He began to publish fiction with The Reporter (1978), which he serialized for the BBC; most of his later novels were crime thrillers, including the China Thrillers beginning with ...
Jones, Neil
(? - ) UK editor of two Warhammer 40,000 Ties: Warhammer 40,000: Deathwing (anth 1990; exp 2001) with David Pringle and Warhammer: The Laughter of Dark Gods (anth 2002) with David Pringle. [JC]
Waltermire, Beecher W
(1858-1932) US lawyer and author, father of the weird fiction author Arthur B Waltermire (1888-1938); he is of some sf interest for The Adventure of a Skeleton: A Tale of Natural Gas (1890), whose abnormally thin protagonist manages to slip down an oil well into the Hollow Earth, where he finds a fantasy-tinged world, and has adventures there. [JC]
Sternberg, Jacques
(1923-2006) Belgian author who published fiction until the end of the century, though sf made up a decreasingly portion of his work; he moved at the end of his life to the memoir form. A particularly idiosyncratic author with a keen sense of the absurd, he built from the early 1950s a unique body of work, often only tenuously linked to sf, often structured as Satires where everyday situations logically degenerate into darkly humorous nightmares, his first novel being ...
Reed, Ishmael
(1938- ) US poet, playwright and author, who emerged in the 1960s as a central representative of the New Black Aesthetic movement, and a figure controversial to the Black critical establishment from the publication of his first novel, The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967), a powerful Satire in which America is visualized as the digestive system of a cannibal used-car salesman. Yellow-Back Radio Broke-Down (1969), 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 ...