SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 9 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.
Site updated on 9 February 2026
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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 ...
Kikuchi Hideyuki
(1949- ) Japanese author of immense domestic popularity, known initially abroad for the Anime adaptations of several of his novels, which formed a substantial component of the 1990s English-language image of Japanese animation as sexualized and violent pulp fiction. He shares a niche within Japanese sf with similarly prolific authors such as Yoshiki Tanaka, Masaki ...
Scholes, Robert
(1929-2016) US academic and sf critic. One of the better-known US theorists in structuralism, he is the author of a number of books on literary theory. In its sustained argument that the essential storytelling element in fiction contradicts any prejudicial inclination to think of the realist novel as more than a phase, The Nature of Narrative (1966; rev vt The Nature of Narrative: Revised and Expanded 2006) with Robert Kellogg (1928-2004) contributes to a fuller ...
Bergey, Earle K
(1901-1952) US illustrator, sometimes signing himself Earle Bergey, E K Bergey, or just Bergey, whose prodigious output for the Pulp magazines ranged across all genres, although it is for his sf work that he is best remembered today; towards the end of his life he began painting paperback covers as well, his most renowned being that for the 1948 Popular Library reprint of Anita Loos's (non-sf) Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925). He received his formal art ...
Elliot, Lee
A House Name used for three sf novels published by Curtis Warren, one each by William Henry Fleming Bird and Denis Hughes and one – Overlord New York (1953) – by an as yet unidentified author. The last is strewn with Scientific Errors, such as a ...
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 ...