SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 12 July 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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Aylesworth, John
(1928-2010) Canadian author whose first work was as a television writer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; subsequently in the US, where he also worked in television. His sf novel, Fee, Fei, Fo, Fum (1963), is a comic story in which a pill enlarges a man to Brobdingnagian proportions (see Great and Small); the New York setting, and some details of the tale, prefigure E L ...
Gordon, Rex
Most frequently used pseudonym of UK author Stanley Bennett Hough (1917-1998) for his sf work, although under his own name he published the borderline Frontier Incident (1951); Mission in Guemo (1953), describing a resurgent Nazi conspiracy centred Lost-Race-like up the Amazon; the borderline-sf thriller Extinction Bomber (1956); and Beyond the Eleventh Hour (1961), a ...
Nesbit, E
(1858-1924) UK playwright, poet and author, who also wrote as Fabian Bland and E Bland (the latter being her husband's name, an unknown proportion of whose signed work was by her); she was a founder of the Fabian Society in 1884. Most of her oeuvre, over a wide-ranging career that extended from the 1880s until after World War One, can be considered under three headings: the nonfantastic adult fiction (not discussed or listed here); the supernatural and weird fiction, some of which contains ...
Gann, Ernest K
(1910-1991) US author, usually of thrillers, whose Brain 2000 (1980) is an sf spoof on Ecology, in which the extraction of oil from parts of the world causes gravitational and orbital disturbances. A smart child (see Children in SF) solves all our problems. [JC]
Large, E C
(1902-1976) UK botanist and author who began to publish poetry and fiction in the late 1920s. Sugar in the Air: A Romance (1937), first of the two connected Charles Pry tales, is a notable and original Scientific Romance bitterly but wryly describing the conflicts which arise between scientific and commercial interests during experiments with artificial photosynthesis; eventually, Charles Pry develops a process to manufacture sugar ...
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 ...