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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.
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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 ...
Kotlan, C M
(? - ) US author, all of whose sf was written in collaboration with G C Edmondson, who see for details. [JC]
Ajor
Pseudonym of New Zealand author John Petrie (? - ), of whom nothing is known beyond his publication of The Secret of Mount Cook: a Myth of South Westland, New Zealand (1894 chap), an adventure story featuring a kind of Time Travel via Suspended Animation, with a frozen body in an Underground cavern within ...
Philip, Alex J
(1879-1955) UK author of Rabbits: A Novel of Realism (1946), which recounts an Invasion by Aliens who treat humans as though they were rabbits, and hunt them for sport (see Games and Sport). [JC]
Clark, Jan
(? - ) US author, mainly known for the two volumes of her Prodigy sequences of Space Operas comprising Prodigy (1997) and Earth Herald (1998), featuring Rieka Degahv, female captain of a military spaceship who becomes embroiled in an interstellar intrigue designed to topple a commonwealth of species, in which humans are present but do not dominate. The fast pace and claustrophobic ...
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 ...