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Monday 15 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.
Site updated on 15 June 2026
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Yolen, Jane
(1939-2026) US author, partially resident in Scotland, who began publishing poems and articles when still in college, and who first came to notice with books for children, the first of many being Pirates in Petticoats (1963). Of her circa 460 titles, many of which won awards in her field, most were for children (see listing below for some of these), many of them being picture books for younger children; most of her adult fiction, of which she wrote relatively little, was ...
Wilson, H W
(1866-1940) UK journalist and author, a founder of the Navy League, and with one of its members, Arnold Henry White, author of a Future War tale, When War Breaks Out [for subtitle see Checklist below] (1898 chap), which dramatizes the dangers of an unprepared navy [for further details see entry on his collaborator]. [JC]
Theaker's Quarterly Fiction
UK Amateur Magazine published by Silver Age Books, Birmingham, and produced by Stephen Theaker (1973- ). It began Spring 2004 and though it has retained the Quarterly reference in its title it has sometimes appeared bimonthly, which is no surprise for a magazine that enjoys being eccentric and unusual. It began very self-indulgently by serializing Theaker's own previously self-published novels Professor Challenger in Space ...
Woodley, Sherrida
(1950- ) US author in whose Near Future sf tale Quick Fall of Light (2010) the survival of a passenger pigeon offers a chance that Homo sapiens will not succumb to a new Pandemic as devastating as the 1918 Spanish flu. [JC]
Ewald, Carl
(1856-1908) Danish author best known for his fairy tales, assembled in various volumes between 1883 and 1907; his Two-Legs series of tales – contained in Two-Legs and Other Stories (coll: trans Alexander Teixeira de Mattos from various sources 1906), The Pond and Other Stories (coll: trans Alexander Teixeira de Mattos from various sources 1909) and The Four Seasons (coll: trans Alexander Teixeira de Mattos from various sources 1913) – ...
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 ...