SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 15 August 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 10 August 2026
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Crowley, John
(1942-2026) US teacher and author who also worked in documentary films and television for some time beginning in 1966. His sf novels have had a considerable impact on the field, and his fantasies established him as a figure whose work courteously but deeply stretched the boundaries of genre literature. / His first novel, The Deep (1975), is set on a flat discworld resting on a pillar that extends beyond measurement into the circumambient galactic Deep, in which very few stars ...
Kojima, Hideo
(1963- ) Japanese Game designer who began work on Videogames with Penguin Adventure (1986 Konami, MSX) designed by Hiroyuki Fukui, Ryouhei Shogaki, an action game in which the player must bring home a golden apple to cure an ailing penguin princess. Kojima's influence is not, however, especially noticeable in this work. The first game he actually designed was Metal Gear ...
Lawrence, Margery
(1889-1969) UK author almost all of whose work was fantasy, with a concentration on ghost stories and tales of the occult [for Ghost Stories, Margery Lawrence, Occult Detectives and Occult Fantasy see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. The Club of the Round Table sequence comprises various tales told within a Club Story frame; in the Miles Pennoyer sequence, Pennoyer solves ...
Thompson, Colin
(1942- ) UK illustrator and author, in Australia from 1995; of his very numerous books, many of them for younger children, he is of sf interest for the Young Adult Future Eden sequence beginning with Future Eden: A Brief History of Next Time (1999), which is set in a severely depopulated Ruined Earth world about 200 years hence. The solitary young protagonist, who lives a hardscrabble ...
Hakim, Tawfiq al-
(1898-1987) Regarded along with Nobel-prize winning author Najib Mahfuz as the most important modern Egyptian author, author of over 50 books of short stories, novels, dramas and essays, some of sf interest. In 1947 he published his first sf short story, "Fi sana malyun" ["In the Year Million"]. His most interesting sf works are plays. In Rihla ila al-ghad (1950; trans as "Voyage to Tomorrow" 1981) he uses relativistic Time Travel during ...
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 ...