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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 ...
Bachelder, John
(1817-1906) US inventor and author of A.D. 2050: Electrical Development at Atlantis (1890) as by A Former Resident of "The Hub", one of many "answers" to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888). In this early example of the Sequel by Other Hands, fifty years have passed, the world has decayed with the exception of the breakaway land of Atlantis in America, where an ...
Balloons
For some six months in 1783 Paris was the Cape Canaveral of the eighteenth century as Parisians watched a succession of extraordinary ascents by hot-air balloons. The first successful manned trip took place on 21 November, as reported by Benjamin Franklin, and it started off a long series of speculations about the conquest of the air, almost certainly the first fictional response being The Aerostatic Spy: Or, Excursions with an Air Balloon by an Aerial Traveller (1785; exp vt ...
Donatti, Louis
According to the evidence of his only novel, a Slovenia-born functionary and author (1781-1852) who in 1805 served in a junior position with Sir William Hoste (1780-1828), a fabulously successful naval Captain in the Napoleonic Wars; from 1806-1831 he was with the British Commissariat in Messina, and for some years in the 1830s in Canada as "deputy-assistant-commissary-general", an experience which caused him to suggest that any future Canadian government should be entirely bilingual; he is ...
Perry, Sarah
(1979- ) UK author whose novels fit comfortably within the armature of Fantastika, while making some room for more straightforward sf readings (see Gothic SF). The protagonist of her first novel, After Me Comes the Flood (2014), who has become bewildered by a heat wave, exits London to find his brother in Norfolk, but goes astray into a mysterious woodland [for Into the ...
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 ...