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Monday 23 June 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.
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Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Chrostowska, S D
(? - ) US-born teacher, journalist and author, in Canada from around 1995; her first novel, Permissions (2013), is nonfantastic. A critical anthology, The Uses of Utopia: New Marxist, Anarchist, and Radical Democratic Perspectives (anth 2017) with James D Ingram, reflects her central preoccupation as an academic with twentieth-century European Utopian thought. She is of sf interest for her second ...
Hale, Martin
A possible pseudonym of Adrian Berry (1937-2016) under which was published The Fourth Reich: A Fantasy of the United Nations (1965), a Near Future political thriller in which a large contingent of recidivist Germans creates chaos in Africa. [JC]
Churchill, David
(? - ) UK author of Young Adult sf novels including It, Us, and the Others (1978), whose young protagonists discover an Alien underwater, and Not My World (1980). He may be the David Churchill credited with the teleplay for the 1986 four-part miniseries presentation of Mervyn Peake's Mr Pye (1953). [JC]
Wolf, Spencer
(? - ) US author of After Mind (2015), a Near Future tale where the brain of a young man with progeria, who is dying of old age symptoms, is rehoused in the body of an artificial child, where he is destined to become an AI consciousness. But he has Amnesia. Family complications ensue. [JC]
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 ...