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Thursday 24 April 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.
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Broderick, Damien
(1944-2025) Australian author, editor and critic; he had a PhD in the semiotics of fiction, science and sf with special reference to the work of Samuel R Delany. He edited four anthologies of Australian sf: The Zeitgeist Machine (anth 1977), Strange Attractors (anth 1985), Matilda at the Speed of Light (anth 1988) and Centaurus: The Best of Australian Science Fiction (anth ...
Lynn, David
(? - ) New Zealand-born author, apparently in UK from adulthood, most active in the 1940s; his sf novel, The Benevolent Despot (1945 chap), depicts a Near Future Britain, here called Hignorania, which, plausibly enough, uses Nuclear Energy for power; the tale heralds the institution of a good-tempered Utopia under the eponymous leader. [JC]
Reynolds, Alastair
(1966- ) UK author who has also worked as a physicist and astronomer – notably 1991-2004 at the Netherlands European Space Research and Technology Centre, a division of the European Space Agency – an experience that strongly informs his work. / His first published story was "Nunivak Snowflakes" in Interzone for June 1990, but it was not for another decade that he published his first novel, Revelation Space ...
Bayley, Barrington J
(1937-2008) UK author, active as a freelance under various names in the first decades of his career, author of juvenile stories, picture-strips and features as well as sf, which he began to publish with "Combat's End" for Vargo Statten Science Fiction Magazine #4 in 1954, where his name was given as J Barrington Bayley. His sf pseudonyms included P F Woods (at least ten stories), Alan Aumbry (one story), John Diamond (one story), and ...
Hough, Emerson
(1857-1923) US author whose first book, The Singing Mouse Stories (coll 1895), is Fantasy, though most of his subsequent works were Westerns of a literary bent, like The Covered Wagon (1922), and including Mother of Gold (1924), in which Psi Powers (in this case scrying) guide the protagonists to an Aztec Lost World, though they find ...
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 ...