SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 14 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 7 September 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Bedford, David
(1937-2011) UK composer and musician. Best known for his collaborations with Mike Oldfield – for instance his orchestral version of Tubular Bells as The Orchestral Tubular Bells (1974) – Bedford was also a skilled composer of popular and avant-garde classical music. His Star Clusters, Nebulae and Places in Devon (1971), scored for two eight-part choirs with a five horn brass group, is low-key, unstrained and ...
Pears, Iain
(1955- ) UK art historian and author, perhaps best known for his Jonathan Argyll series of nonfantastic detective novels featuring an art historian [not listed below]. His most influential singleton, An Instance of the Fingerpost (1997), scrutinizes the same seventeenth-century intellectual revolution focused on by Neal Stephenson in his Baroque Trilogy: the metaphysics and politics attending the shift from ...
Williams, Phillip B
(1986- ) US teacher, poet and author whose first novel Ours (2024) takes place mostly in the eponymous quasi-magical Polder (see Utopia; Zone), founded in the 1830s near St Louis, Missouri, initially as a refuge for freed or escaped slaves (see Race in SF). Enemies attempting to reach Ours find themselves disoriented in the surrounding forest [for Into the Woods here and ...
Rolling Stones, The
UK blues-rock band formed in 1962 which has enjoyed, to some degree, both celebrity and longevity. The group is led by vocalist Mick Jagger (1943- ) and guitarist Keith Richards (1943- ), who together write most of the group's songs; the long-time drummer, from 1963, was Charlie Watts (1941-2021). The Rolling Stones merit mention here primarily for the album Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967), an uncharacteristically psychedelic ...
Swindells, Robert E
(1939- ) UK translator and author who has concentrated for most of his career on Young Adult novels, several of them set in his native Yorkshire. Although most of his work has been fantasy, sf novels of interest have appeared at various points over this career, beginning with When Darkness Comes (1973), a Prehistoric SF tale movingly depicting the consequences of the incursion of ...
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 ...