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Sunday 16 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.
Site updated on 10 August 2026
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Crowley, John
(1942-2026) US teacher and author who also worked in documentary films and television for some time beginning in 1966. His sf novels have had a considerable impact on the field, and his fantasies established him as a figure whose work courteously but deeply stretched the boundaries of genre literature. / His first novel, The Deep (1975), is set on a flat discworld resting on a pillar that extends beyond measurement into the circumambient galactic Deep, in which very few stars ...
Johnson, James B
(1944- ) US author who began publishing sf with his first novel, Daystar and Shadow (1981), in which a Post-Holocaust USA is depicted. More interesting, though the voltage of innovation remains low, is Trekmaster (1987), set on a rediscovered colony planet whose inhabitants are divided over the issue of reunion with the Galactic Federation; included are some dynastic romance, a rite of passage and a ...
Psychology
The science of the mind is sufficiently different from the physical sciences for its discoveries and hypotheses to set very different problems and offer very different opportunities to the writer of speculative fiction. Psychology still carries a considerable burden of pseudoscientific conjecture even if one sets aside its close and problematic relationship with parapsychology (see ESP; Psi Powers); a case in point may be ...
Yeats, William Butler
(1865-1939) Irish playwright and poet, active from 1885, one of the two or three most significant twentieth century poets to write in English, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1923. Unlike his close contemporary Wyndham Lewis, he was relatively immune to the kind of early twentieth century modernism sympathetic to pre-World War One Futurist epiphanies of the Machine (see ...
Wells, Barry
Pseudonym of UK author Horace Arthur Richards (1911-1971), author of one sf Tie of interest, The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), novelizing the Disaster film The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) [which see]. This novel resolves the film's cliffhanger ending (will the news headline be "World Saved" or "World Doomed"?) on its final page, when the rains do come and ...
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 ...