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
Sponsor of the day: Ted Chiang
Casparian, Gregory
(1856-1942) Turkish-Armenia-born painter, photo-engraver and author, whose distant Near Future sf novel, An Anglo-American Alliance: A Serio-Comic Romance and Forecast of the Future (1906), frames its central story with a description of a twentieth-century world dominated by America and the UK; Technology has advanced in various ways; Sex can be determined prenatally; ...
Hyder, Alan
Working name of Frederick Alan Hyder (?1895-1952), UK civil servant and author who according to biographical data on a 1936 dustjacket saw service in France in World War One and lived at various times in Egypt and the West Indies, perhaps Jamaica (where he set two novels and a lengthy sequence of stories); in youth he swapped the order of his birth names and preferred to be known as Alan Frederick Hyder. He was a prolific contributor of short fiction to the ...
Gilbert, Zoe
(? - ) UK academic and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Time Machine" in Luna Station Quarterly for December 2011. A sophisticated use of interacting modes within the enabling frame of Fantastika consistently marks her longer fiction. In her first novel, Folk (2018), an isolated Island houses a complex community whose interactions, as told through ...
Rottensteiner, Franz
(1942- ) Austrian sf critic, editor and literary agent; he has a PhD from the University of Vienna. He has edited the SF of the World series for Insel Verlag, the Fantastic Novels series for Paul Zsolnay Verlag, and the Fantastic Library series – now over 250 volumes – for Suhrkamp Verlag. He writes in English as well as in German, his critical articles having appeared in ...
Seidel, Peter
(1926- ) US architect, planner and author, much of his work in the first two capacities focusing on the Ecological crises of the past half-century. His first nonfiction book, Invisible Walls: Why We Ignore the Damage We Inflict on the Planet ... and Ourselves (1998; rev 2001), directly addresses these issues. The Futures Studies implications of this text are dramatized, at points ...
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 ...