SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 13 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
Sponsor of the day: Conversation 2023
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 ...
Jacobson, Mark
(1948- ) US journalist – best known for his 1970s work for the Village Voice in New York – and author of an elaborately confabulated sf/fantasy novel, Gojiro (1991); the tale is seen through the eyes of a mild-mannered Monster, a Mutant lizard named after the Japanese film monster Gojira. Gojiro is a kind of Candide (see ...
Lampen, C Dudley
(1859-1943) UK author, mostly of Children's SF for boys; of sf interest are his Lost World novels, including The Queen of the Extinct Volcano (1898), the eponymous ruler of dark-skinned subjects being a She figure; Mirango, the Man Eater: A Tale of Central Africa: Being the Narrative of George Pryce, Traveller and Exile, First Writ Down Anno Domini 1706, and Now Retold (1899), ...
Sidorova, J M
(? - ) Russian-born research scientist and author, in the USA from 1990, who began publish work of genre interest with "The Witch, The Tinman, The Flies" in Asimov's for August 2010. Her sf series, the Age of Ice sequence comprising The Age of Ice (2013) and The Colors of Cold: A New Story from the Age of Ice (2013 ebook), examines in sf and "literary" terms the range of implications of ice: ...
Gakov, Vladimir
Originally the collective pseudonym of Russian authors Vladimir Gopman, Andrei Gavrilov and Mikhail Kovalchuk (VLADIMIR Gopman, Andrei GAvrilov, and Mikhail KOValchuk). For the purposes of this encyclopedia, for whose second edition he revised or wrote many of the entries on Russian sf, including Russia, this is the pseudonym of Kovalchuk writing solo. Russian critic and editor Mikhail (Andreevich) Kovalchuk (1951- ) is a trained physicist who ...
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 ...