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Thursday 12 February 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.
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Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Settle, Elkanah
(1648-1724) UK poet, journalist and playwright, active from 1666; fully and controversially involved, first as a Whig and then a Tory, in the tempestuous political life of his time. Of sf interest is The World in the Moon: An Opera [for subtitle see Checklist below] (performed 1697; 1697), an elaborate comedy taking much of its story from Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone (1638), set partly on Earth and partly on the ...
Pullman, Philip
(1946- ) UK author, mostly of books for children and the Young Adult market, and mostly fantasy; his first novel, however, The Haunted Storm (1972) as Philip N Pullman, is a nonfantastic Bildungsroman for adults, though its climax in a devastated Mithraic temple hints at the shape of future work. In his second, Galatea (1978), also for adults, the protagonist's quest for his missing wife changes by stages ...
Tanton, Bruce
(1946- ) UK-born author in Australia from the age of nine; of his Young Adult novels, one is sf, The Jericho Factor (1993), a Space Opera in which Homo sapiens is threatened by an Alien intelligence. [JC]
Bair, Patrick
Pseudonym of UK author David Groom (? - ), whose Faster! Faster! (1950) is a Dystopian fable with an sf flavour in which representatives of three classes, caught on a train which goes on for ever, must work out their destinies; its abstract nature differentiates the tale from his later work, though Gargantua Falls (1951) places very similar Satirical points in an only ...
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 ...