SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 16 July 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 14 July 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Trevor, Ralph
Pseudonym of UK author James Reginald Wilmot (1897-1944), active for nine years as a crime novelist before his early death; he also wrote as by Frances Stuart. He is of minor sf interest for The Ghost Counts Ten (1938), a thriller featuring a heat-melting Ray. [JC]
Kuprin, Alexander
(1870-1938) Russian author, active from before 1890, whose first novella of significance, "Moloch" (December 1896 Russkoye Bogatstvo), goes to extremities akin to Fantastika in its attempts to render the terror and disastrousness of unfettered capitalist exploitation. Most of his remaining oeuvre is nonfantastic, though some sf is assembled in a French translation, Le soleil liquide et autres récits fantastiques ...
Fowler, Tom
(? - ) Scottish playwright in whose fourth play, Hope Has a Happy Meal (performed 2023; 2023), the eponymous Hope, after decades away, returns Mysterious-Stranger-like to her native land, the People's Republic of Kola Kola, which has been transformed into a tyrannical Dystopia run by international corporations and suffering very severely the effects of ...
Diplomat, A
Pseudonym of the unidentified US author (? -? ) of The Rise and Fall of the United States: A Leaf from History, A D 2060 (1898), a Future History describing the Near Future fall of America after the working classes have conducted an ill-advised rebellion against the wealthy. [JC]
Metcalfe, Hope Cranstoun
(1866-1939) Malaysian-born translator and author, in UK from childhood, who translated three Jules Verne titles, one translation being published in two volumes [see Checklist below]. [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 ...