SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 14 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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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, 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 ...
Chambers, Stephen
(?1981- ) US author who began publishing sf with his Hope sequence of tales comprising Hope's End (2001) and Hope's War (2002), a colony planet whose technology (the backstory is moderately complex) is at about the level of medieval Western Europe. The Planetary Romance glow this setting gives off is darkened through the genuine difficulties experienced by the young protagonist Vel in his ...
Johnson, Bill
(1956-2022) US author, journalist, technical writer and business administrator, a Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop graduate, who began to publish work of genre interest with "Stormfall" in Clarion SF (anth 1977) edited by Kate Wilhelm. Much of his fiction is strongly flavoured by his South Dakota origins, as in his best-known story "We Will Drink a Fish Together ..." (May 1997 ...
Cawthorn, James
(1929-2008) UK illustrator, critic and author; he often used the working name Jim Cawthorn, though he also went by J Cawthorn or simply Cawthorn, and his name was sometimes rendered as Cawthorne. After he entered sf around 1954, his career was largely defined by his relationship with Michael Moorcock – the men quickly bonded due to their shared interest in Edgar Rice Burroughs – and they first worked ...
Harting, Pieter
(1812-1885) Dutch polymath, immensely prolific in scientific fields such as biology, medicine and geology, and an early advocate of Charles Darwin's theory of Evolution. His one sf novel, Anno 2065: een blik in de toekomst (1865 chap; vt Anno 2070: een blik in de toekomst 1870 chap; trans Alex V W Bikkers as Anno Domini 2071 1871) as by Dr Dioscorides, posits a liberal world 200 years hence which is at peace, has new ...
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 ...