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 ...
Coulton, G G
(1858-1947) UK medieval historian and author, active from the 1890s, father of Sarah Campion. The unrelenting secular focus to which he exposed his subject matter, in books like Life in the Middle Ages (1910), generated a decades-long mutual detestation between him and figures like Hilaire Belloc and G K Chesterton, whose sentimentalized vision of England as essentially ...
Sawyer, Walter Leon
(1862-1915) US journalist and author, usually for younger readers; the Jack Lorimer series, all as by Winn Standish, focused on sporting feats. Of sf interest is An Outland Journey (1896), in which a young lad finds himself in "Fairyland", which takes the form, strictly (if absurdly), of a rule-bound Utopia. But it is all a dream. [JC]
Justice League of America
A team of DC Comics Superheroes who first appeared in issues #28, #29, and #30 of the tryout Comic Brave and the Bold (1960) before graduating in the same year to their own title; they have continued to regularly appear in DC comics to this day. They were the successors of an earlier group of DC heroes from the 1940s, the Justice Society of America, who were then reimagined as the ...
Sparhawk, Bud
Working name of US author John C Sparhawk (1937- ), who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Tomkins Battery Case" in Analog for August 1976, his best known short work being the Sam Boone sequence of tales beginning with "Sam Boone and the Thermal Couple" (October 1995 Analog), about a helterskelter but competent human who deals with visiting Aliens from various parts of ...
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 ...