SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 13 January 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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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Dickens, Charles
(1812-1870) UK editor and author, almost certainly the greatest novelist in the English language. Dickens wrote considerable fantasy, including most famously A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas (1843) which, though not exactly a Club Story, is notable for an implied frame narrator who seems to be telling us the tale aloud, as though he were incanting a mini-saga [for Christmas Books see The ...
Jackson, G Gibbard
(1877-1935) UK author, usually of tales for boys on aeronautical subjects, and of nonfiction about air travel and other related topics; of sf interest is Arctic Air Terror (1937), a Lost Race tale set in the Yukon Territory. Within a caldera heated by volcanic action, a technologically advanced but priest-ridden civilization of "white Indians", originally from Ancient Egypt, uses its helicopter-like airships ...
Ward, David [2]
(1967- ) Canadian teacher and author whose Grasslands Young Adult sequence beginning with Escape the Mask (2001) places its young cast in a rural world dominated, all the same, by a Dystopian tyranny, which they must escape. Archipelago (2008) takes its contemporary protagonist via Time Travel 14,000 years into the past, where he interacts with ...
Flower Kings, The
Prolific Swedish prog-rock band, founded in 1993 by guitarist and singer Roine Stolt (1956- ). The band records in English, and produces lengthy, musically complex albums at a dizzying rate. Back in the World of Adventures (album 1995) is a satisfying if generic collision of Fantasy and sf figures. Retropolis (album 1996) is a concept album set in the titular future-city, in which Judas ...
Harvey, Samantha
(1975- ) UK teacher and author whose third novel, All Is Song (2012), clearly does not represent its reincarnation of Socrates (470-399 BCE) in contemporary London as literally intended, though there is a clear similitude between the eidolon and the man dying now. She is of sf interest for her fifth novel, Orbital (2023), a contemplative rendering of its six protagonists' sensory responses to their visions of the ...
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 ...