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Wednesday 4 November 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 2 November 2026
Sponsor of the day: David Cowhig
Stevens, David
(1937- ) UK author of Sunset and Morning Star (1976), a Satire for the Young Adult market; the tale is set on a strange planet where a modified topsy-turvydom operates, with the fattest person on the planet being elected its ruler, and "thins" treated as slaves. [JC]
Panshin, Cory
(1947- ) US author and critic, collaborator with her husband, Alexei Panshin (whom see for further details), since before 1975. With him she co-wrote the fantasy Earth Magic (April-September 1973 Fantastic as "The Son of Black Morca"; 1978) and the critical volumes SF in Dimension (coll 1976; exp 1980) and ...
Broun, Bill
(? - ) US journalist, editor and author whose first novel, Night of the Animals (2016), is set in a Near Future Dystopian London which has suffered most of the ills the twenty-first century has been able to inflict by the year 2052: demoralized by top-down economic paralysis, trapped in a surveillance-obsessed spam-choked ...
Abramson, Ben
(1898-1955) Lithuanian-born book dealer, book collector, agent, bibliographer, publisher and editor, in USA from early childhood. He established the Argus Book Shop in Chicago in 1920, transferring the business to New York, where he was active from 1944 to 1949. Although he does not seem to have been an active participant in early sf Fandom, his interest in the literature of the fantastic in general was initially demonstrated through a ...
Nicolson, Marjorie Hope
(1894-1981) US scholar and academic, in the latter role at Smith College from 1929 to 1941, and at Columbia University from 1941 until 1962. Some of her work – like Newton Demands the Muse: Newton's Opticks and the Eighteenth Century Poets (1946) – is indirectly useful to students of Proto SF. Of direct interest in the study of early works in the field are two books focusing on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: ...
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 ...