SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 11 March 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 March 2026
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Roberts, Wilfred Joseph
(1898-1976) UK illustrator, active from the early 1930s, almost exclusively for magazines and publishers whose works were deemed ephemeral, so that much of his output remains obscure; he is thought to have normally signed his work W J Roberts, W F Roberts or L J Roberts, though much may be anonymous or under other names. He is credited in this encyclopedia for three volumes of the Gees sequence by E Charles Vivian writing as Jack Mann, ...
Kalfař, Jaroslav
(1988- ) Czech-born author, in USA from the age of fifteen. His first novel, Spaceman of Bohemia (2017), initially depicts an abstractly conceived journey through the inner Solar System, narrated with an indifferent hauteur as to any literal understanding of the SF Megatext typical of the Mainstream Writer of SF; but in this case savingly aerated by ...
O'Brien, Fitz-James
(1828-1862) Irish-born US author, whose natal name was Michael Fitz-James O'Brien but who did not use the Michael: he published his first poem in 1845 as Fitz-James O'Brien, which name he seems to have legally adopted around the time of his arrival in New York in 1852; he remained active until his death from an infected wound in the US Civil War. O'Brien contributed numerous poems and minor stories to the magazines, his first work of genre interest being "An Arabian Nightmare" for ...
Santos, Domingo
Pseudonym of Spanish author, editor, translator, anthologist and columnist Pedro Domingo Mutiñó (1941-2018), the major contemporary Spanish sf writer, considered as the father of sf in his country. Throughout a lifetime devoted to sf he published about forty novels (several in collaboration), a dozen collections, a hundred stories, fifty Anthologies, almost a thousand translated works, and hundreds of articles, ...
Omega Point
Originally a metaphysical term conceived by the Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) to denote the state of maximum complexity and consciousness towards which he considered the universe must evolve; the Roman Catholic Church barred his work from publication until after his death. Secularly aspirational versions of Teilhard de Chardin's concepts are central to the "singulatarian" Transhumanism influentially espoused by Ray Kurzweil (1948- ) in ...
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 ...