SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 15 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
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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 ...
Kingsbury, Donald
(1929- ) US-born academic and author, in Canada from 1948, naturalized in 1955, a teacher of mathematics at McGill University from 1956 until his retirement in 1986. He began publishing sf with "The Ghost Town" in Astounding for June 1952; he produced relatively little for nearly 30 years, though his intermittent appearances in Astounding, with both fiction and nonfiction, were generally noticed. ...
Scott, Alan
(1947- ) UK author whose sf novel, Project Dracula (1971; vt The Anthrax Mutation 1976), features an explosion in a Near Future UK research facility in a Space Station, which indirectly releases 1500 experimental bats infected with anthrax. A Pandemic is threatened (see Disaster). [JC/DRL]
Androids
The term "android", which means "manlike", was initially used of Automata, and the form "androides" first appeared in English in 1727 in reference to supposed attempts by the alchemist Albertus Magnus (circa 1200-1280) to create an artificial man; but something like androids long precede their being called androids. Treating Caliban as android-like may over-egg Prospero's Godgame control over his creatures in William ...
Vizzini, Ned
(1981-2013) US journalist and author born Edward Vizzini (name legally changed) who committed Suicide due to profound clinical depression; much of his nonfiction work, assembled in Teen Angst? Naaah (coll 2000), deals in various ways with the ways this illness afflicts adolescents and young men and women, as does his second novel, the nonfantastic It's Kind of a Funny Story (2006). His first novel, the ...
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 ...