SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 16 December 2025
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 15 December 2025
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Varley, John
(1947-2025) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Picnic on Nearside" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for August 1974, and who was soon thought to be the most significant new sf writer of the late 1970s. He was fresh, he was complex, he understood the imaginative implications of transformative developments like cloning (see Clones) and Identity Transfer, many of ...
Dewes, J S
(1993- ) US Videogame writer, cinematographer, screenwriter and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Threshold" in Spectrum 27: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art (anth 2020) edited by Katherine Chu and John Fleskes. The Divide sequence of Military SF tales beginning with The Last Watch (2021) features a Dirty Dozen team of tough miscreant soldiers ...
Farrer, Matthew
(1970- ) Australian author who also signs as Matt Farrer, most of whose work to date has consisted of contributions to the Warhammer 40,000 Role Playing Game universe, beginning with "Badlands Skelter's Downhive Monster Show" for Inferno! in 1999, and continuing with Warhammer 40,000: Crossfire (2003), which features the continuing character Shira Calpurnia of the Adeptus Arbites, and other similar ...
Kelly, James Patrick
(1951- ) US author who began to publish after attending the Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop in 1974. With "Dea Ex Machina" in Galaxy for April 1975 (as by James Kelly), he began very quickly to establish himself as an author whose work contained, within a sometimes sober demeanour, considerable pyrotechnical charge. In the selfconscious 1980s controversy between ...
Foyle, Naomi
(? - ) UK editor, poet and author whose first novel, Seoul Survivors (2013), is a Near Future thriller set just before a meteor known as Lucifer's Hammer threatens to devastate the planet, as in Larry Niven's and Jerry Pournelle's Lucifer's Hammer (1977), about a Comet striking Earth. A plot to use ...
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 ...