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Wednesday 11 February 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 9 February 2026
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Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Dahlberg, Edward
(1900-1977) US author, in active service during World War One; most famous for his first book, Bottom Dogs (1929), whose transgressive frankness about modern life from below set his reputation as an advocate of the rights of the working class. His later work, though he made no convulsive Turn to the Right, became sufficiently acceptable for him to be given a Guggenheim Award in 1976. He is of some sf interest for Those Who Perish ...
Neufeld, John
(1938-2021) US author, mostly for Young Adult readers, beginning with Edgar Allan (1968). He is of sf interest for Sleep, Two, Three, Four! (1971), a highly politicized Near Future Dystopia dominated by "Nixon and Company", and featuring the attempts of a group of teenagers to transcend their conditioning – the model of George ...
O'Brien, Willis H
(1886-1962) US special-effects supervisor in the Cinema industry. For his own amusement he early began to experiment with stop-motion photography. A one-minute home movie of an animated caveman and Dinosaur, involving 960 separate exposures, led to the producer and exhibitor Herman Wobber (1880-1965) advancing him $5000 to make a more elaborate version of the same subject: The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy ...
Trussoni, Danielle
(1973- ) US journalist, podcaster and author who remains best-known for the Angelology sequence of secret-history Bible-based fantasies beginning with Angelology (2010), featuring an age-long war between a group known as the Angelologists and the "Nephilim", bad angels who have bred with humans. In terms of the tonality of portentousness, the tales hover between the conspiracy novels of Dan Brown and the novels of David ...
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 ...