SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 9 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 8 December 2025
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Acworth, Andrew
(1857-1895) UK author – according to Darko Suvin, a barrister named Andrew Oswald Acworth – whose sf novel, A New Eden (1896), set 100 years in the future, features the escape of two depressed protagonists from the decaying republican UK, which has suffered from Devolution of the human stock, to an egalitarian but hidebound Island Utopia which fails ...
What, Leslie
(1955- ) US author who has also written as by Leslie Joyce; her novel under that name, the nonfantastic Nice Girls Do (2001), is a romance set amid the dangers of World War Two. Her second novel, Olympic Games (short version May 1996 Asimov's as "The Goddess is Alive, And, Well, Living in New York City"; 2004), a fantasy set mostly in New York, plays ...
Catalan SF
Catalan is not just the language of Catalonia, but a language shared with other areas of Spain, France, and even Italy. Catalan is also the official language of Andorra, the small country set in the middle of the Pyrenees. Most Catalan speakers are bilingual, with Catalan being used as a first language by fewer than half of them. There is a certainly very solid literary tradition in Catalan, which includes a long list of sf works – among them an indispensable masterpiece, Manuel ...
Ahern, Jerry
Working name of US author Jerome Morrell Ahern (1946-2012), most of whose output consisted of violent Weapons-oriented Post-Holocaust novels, most notably in his Survivalist sequence, in which ex-CIA agent John Rourke attempts to preserve his family after a global nuclear conflict. This is perhaps the most influential series in the subgenre of Survivalist Fiction. The first arc of the ...
Latter, Simon
(? - ) UK author of two Ties to The Man from U.N.C.L.E. universe: The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. #1: The Golden Globules Affair (1967) and The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. #3: The Golden Boats of Taradata Affair (1967). [JC]
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 ...