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Sunday 7 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 1 December 2025
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Stoppard, Tom
Working name of Czech-born playwright and screenwriter Tomáš Straussler (1937-2025), in the UK since 1946, the Stoppard surname being acquired from his stepfather when his widowed mother remarried in 1945. His early dramatic work was characterized by extravagant wit and wordplay, and an Absurdist application of logic to surreal or insane situations. Following the broadcast of several Radio plays, his ...
Whale, James
(1889-1957) UK-born Hollywood director, in active service during World War One; his career in US Cinema began in 1929. His first film of genre interest was the classic adaptation of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus (1818; rev 1831) as Frankenstein (1931), a highly influential ...
Janin, Jules
(1804-1874) French author, active from the 1820s, who first came to prominence for L'Âne mort et la Femme guillotinée (1829; trans Terry Hale as The Dead Donkey and the Guillotined Woman 1993), a very early example of what would become known as the conte cruel [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. In its counterintuitive lightheartedness – the plot of the tale is ...
Anonymous
This entry records those relatively few Anonymous SF Authors who did not use a pseudonym and whose identity has never been established. The ordering below is first chronological by year of first publication, then alphabetical by title. / 1. Unidentified author of A Voyage to the World in the Centre of the Earth (1755) [for full title see Checklist directly below], a Proto SF tale which describes a ...
O'Neal, James
Pseudonym of US law officer and author James O Born (1960- ), who writes nonfantastic thrillers under his own name. As O'Neal, his Tom Wilner sequence, set in a partially uninhabitable Ruined Earth America after World War Three and associated Disasters, is of sf interest. In the first instalment, The Human Disguise (2009), the noir detective ...
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 ...