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Sunday 12 July 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.
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Smith, Clark Ashton
(1893-1961) US sculptor and author, of primary interest for his tales of Science Fantasy and horror (see Horror in SF); the rich style (sometimes idiomatic, sometimes "jewelled" in the early Lord Dunsany manner) and baroque invention of this work did much to transform the interplanetary romance of the early years of the century into the full-fledged Post-World War Two ...
Kruchten, Marcia H
(1932-2010) US author of a juvenile fantasy, The Ghost in the Mirror (1985 chap), and of a Tie to the Shared World Omni Odysseys sequence, Skyborn (1988; vt Skytorn 1988). [JC]
Gamboe, Scott
(1969- ) US author whose Avenger sequence, comprising The Killing Frost (2006) and New Dawn Rising (2009), is Military SF set within an interstellar Space Opera venue, where a human coalition, corrupted from within by politicians, comes close to war with an Alien counterpart hegemony; the hero of the tale breaks all the rules in order to gain ...
Velikovsky, Immanuel
(1895-1979) Russian-born psychiatrist and author, in Germany from 1921, in Palestine 1924-1939, and then in US until his death; primarily known for a series of books putting forward, with a vast amount of documentation and argument, a theory of Earth's history which proposes that comparatively recent large-scale changes in the solar system had catastrophic effects on the Earth, and that historical evidence for this Cosmology (in the form of legends, ...
Trussoni, Danielle
(1973- ) US journalist, podcaster and author who remains best-known for the Angelology sequence of secret-history Bible-based fantasies beginning with Angelology (2010), featuring an age-long war between a group known as the Angelologists and the "Nephilim", bad angels who have bred with humans. In terms of the tonality of portentousness, the tales hover between the conspiracy novels of Dan Brown and the novels of David ...
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 ...