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Thursday 16 July 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 14 July 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Morris, Roberta
(? - ) Canadian documentary producer, priest and author, most of whose fiction is nonfantastic; she is of sf interest for Vigil (1986), a Near Future tale set on the fictional Hawaiian island of Kaane after a nuclear Disaster has had poisonous effects on humanity. Some hope, through the birth of a severely affected child, is premised. [JC]
Costikyan, Greg
(1959- ) US Game designer and author, inducted into the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design Hall of Fame in 1999. Costikyan is a rare example of a designer who has worked on three generations of modern games, from Wargames through Role Playing Games to Videogames. He began developing Wargames as a teenager, helping ...
Straus, Ralph
(1882-1950) UK author who also published as by Ralph Strode; his only sf novel, The Dust Which Is God: An Undimensional Adventure (1907 chap), features a frustrated scientist (see Mad Scientist) whose mentor from another Dimension serves as his Virgilian guide on a tour of various exemplary planets (see Cosmology; Utopia), where he learns that the goal of ...
Flynn, John L
(1954- ) US academic and author, mostly of nonfiction studies in sf Cinema, including Dissecting Aliens: Terror in Space (1995), on the Alien sequence of films, and War of the Worlds: From Wells to Spielberg (2005). Short fiction has been assembled in Visions in Light and Shadow (coll 2001); in his awkward first novel, The Jovian Dilemma (2006), a corrupt ...
Invisibility
The fantasy of being able to make oneself invisible is a common childhood daydream. As with all such daydreams, literary treatments of the theme tend to be cautionary tales; the three-decker novel The Invisible Gentleman (1833) by James Dalton is the most extravagant nineteenth-century example. No good comes of it in such early sf stories as Edward Page Mitchell's "The Crystal Man" (January 1881 The Sun anon), H G ...
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 ...