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Sunday 9 August 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.
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The pseudonym (an anagram of her first name) under which Rachel Ruth Cosgrove Payes (1922-1998), originally a research biologist, published her sf; though her first novel, a contribution to the Oz world, Hidden Valley of Oz (1951), appeared as by Rachel R Cosgrove (see Sequels by Other Hands), and her last, The Wicked Witch of Oz (1993) as by Rachel Cosgrove Payes; as well, in her later years she wrote short fiction ...
Mader, Friedrich W
(1866-1945) German author, mainly of juvenile novels, many set in German East Africa and written somewhat in the style of H Rider Haggard. Wunderwelten (1911; trans Max Shachtman as Distant Worlds: The Story of a Voyage to the Planets 1932) is a juvenile which takes its Spaceship crew to Mars and finally – one of the first sf texts to ...
Du Brul, Jack
(1968- ) US author who has focused on Technothrillers, some of them extending into the fantastic, as does his first novel, Vulcan's Forge (1998) as by Jack B Du Brul, which begins the Philip Mercer sequence featuring a geologist who – not entirely unlike Steven Spielberg's similarly scholarly Indiana Jones – has physical gifts extending beyond the probable. In ...
Martin, David S
(1913-? ) UK author whose sf novel is No Lack of Space (1967). [JC/DRL]
Tanigawa Nagaru
(1970- ) Japanese author largely in the Light Novel (chapbook) format, whose works bridge the ever-closing gap between fans of literary sf, Manga and Anime in Japanese culture. A graduate in Law from Kwansei Gakuin University, he first published sf with Dengeki Aegis 5 ["Shock! Aegis 5"] (March 2003 Dengeki Moeō; fixup 2004), a ...
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 ...