SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 17 June 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 15 June 2026
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Yolen, Jane
(1939-2026) US author, partially resident in Scotland, who began publishing poems and articles when still in college, and who first came to notice with books for children, the first of many being Pirates in Petticoats (1963). Of her circa 460 titles, many of which won awards in her field, most were for children (see listing below for some of these), many of them being picture books for younger children; most of her adult fiction, of which she wrote relatively little, was ...
New Wave
This term, as applied to Science Fiction, is borrowed from film criticism, where it was much used in the early 1960s as a translation of the French nouvelle vague to refer to the experimental cinema associated with Jean-Luc Godard (1930- ), François Truffaut (1932-1984) and others. (It was also later applied to music around 1977 as a synonym for Punk.) The term was first used with reference to UK sf writers by P Schuyler ...
Harkins, James W
(1863/1864-1910) US playwright and author of A Prince of the East: A Romance (1900), a Lost Race tale with occult elements set in the Far East. [JC]
Weddle, David
(? - ) US journalist, Television producer, screenwriter and author, who has created episodes for Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-1999) and The Twilight Zone (2002-2003), among others. He has published relatively little in book form, over ...
Siddell, Thomas
(? - ) UK videogame animator and cartoonist, also known as Tom Siddell; best known for the long-running webcomic Gunnerkrigg Court which began in April 2005. Gunnerkrigg Court centres on Antimony "Annie" Carver and her friend Katerina "Kat" Donlan in a surreal UK boarding school. The story contrasts the semi-mythical forest outside of the school with a large urban sprawl of mostly lifeless school grounds. Annie Carver takes on the role of ...
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 ...