SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 7 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.
Site updated on 2 June 2026
Sponsor of the day: Paul Giamatti
Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Miller, Phyllis
(1920-2001) US librarian and author who collaborated with Andre Norton on three novels for children. Seven Spells to Sunday (1979) and House of Shadows (1984) are Fantasies, the former featuring travel to a magical Dimension and the latter being a supernatural thriller; Ride the Green Dragon (1985) is a nonfantastic tale of mystery and suspense. [DRL]
Paine, Albert Bigelow
(1861-1937) US author best remembered as Mark Twain's confidant, whose posthumous works he unconscionably tampered with before publication: The Mysterious Stranger (1916) was cobbled together from three separate manuscripts. Mark Twain's Autobiography (1924 2vols) was savagely cut, expurgated, and entirely restructured. / Paine was primarily a writer and editor of children's fiction, though two of his adult novels are of sf ...
Shinjō Kazuma
(? - ) Japanese author whose early success came in 1991 with a Tie to a Play-by-Mail game: Hōrai Gakuen ["Penglai Academy"] set at a huge, 100,000-strong school of duellists and schemers, itself on an offshore island that takes its name from that of the "isles of the immortals" in Chinese legend. His subsequent work has largely ...
Morris, Dave
(1957- ) UK author who began to publish genre work with Gamebooks mostly written for children, the first being Crypt of the Vampire (1984), opening the Golden Dragon Fantasy Gamebooks sequence. Of direct sf interest is Dinobot War (1985 chap), the first of five Transformers Adventure Game Books Ties to the Transformers franchise. Morris has also ...
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 ...