SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 7 December 2025
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 1 December 2025
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Stoppard, Tom
Working name of Czech-born playwright and screenwriter Tomáš Straussler (1937-2025), in the UK since 1946, the Stoppard surname being acquired from his stepfather when his widowed mother remarried in 1945. His early dramatic work was characterized by extravagant wit and wordplay, and an Absurdist application of logic to surreal or insane situations. Following the broadcast of several Radio plays, his ...
Casewit, Curtis W
(1922-2002) German-born author, in US from 1948; linguistically fluent, he did military service with the French Army in World War Two, later serving as an interpreter for the British Army. Almost all of his work was nonfiction, much of it about skiing; he began publishing work of genre interest with an sf story, "The Mask", in Weird Tales for March 1952. His sf novel, The Peacemakers (1960), depicts conflicting societies in a virtually depopulated ...
Butler, Octavia E
(1947-2006) US author who began publishing sf with "Crossover" in Clarion (anth 1971) edited by Robin Scott Wilson, but who made no real impact on the sf field until the appearance of the Patternist sequence, all released in the publisher's Doubleday Science Fiction series: Patternmaster (1976), Mind of My Mind (1977), Survivor (1978), Wild Seed (1980) and ...
Gentry, Alistair
(1973- ) UK author and graphic artist, whose two novels of sf interest are Their Heads Are Anonymous (1997), set in the quasi-Pocket Universe of the Bigger Amusement Park, which is invaded by Aliens, and Monkey Boys (1999), in which monkeys undergo Genetic Engineering designed to make them into organic ...
Mitchell, V E
Working name of US author Victoria Estelle Mitchell Gustafson (1954-2017), married to Jon Gustafson, who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Captain" in The Moscow Moffia Presents Rat Tales (anth 1987) edited by Jon Gustafson (her husband) and Dean Wesley Smith under the joint pseudonym Smith Gustafson. Mitchell wrote four novel Ties ...
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 ...