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Thursday 19 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 18 February 2026
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Apparitions
UK tv series (2008). BBC, Lime Pictures. Directed by Joe Ahearne. Written by Joe Ahearne. Cast includes Luigi Diberti, Siobhan Finneran, Elyes Gabel, David Gyasi, Martin Shaw, John Shrapnel and Rick Warden. Six 60-minute episodes. Colour. / Father Jacob Myers (Shaw) is a London-based priest tasked with investigating the "causes of saints", a Catholic detective responsible for assessing the veracity of miracles. He has been targeted by the forces of evil (see ...
Erskine, Thomas
(1750-1823) Scottish politician, barrister, poet and author, famous in the 1790s for his frequently successful court appearances on behalf of the freedom of the press, including a famous defense of Thomas Paine in 1792, and of figures prosecuted by a government whose responses to perceived republican threats to the British state prefigure some government actions in the early twenty-first century; he served as Lord Chancellor 1806-1807. He was active as a poet from as early as 1768; as a ...
Cadigan, Pat
Working name of US author Patricia Oren Kearney Cadigan (1953- ), who began publishing sf with "Death from Exposure" for Shayol #2, February 1978; this Semiprozine, which she edited throughout its existence (1977-1985), was remarkable both for the quality of stories it published and for its production values. She later assembled much of her best shorter work in Patterns: Stories (coll 1989), where ...
Tulli, Magdalena
(1955- ) Polish author whose work interfuses mythopoeisis with experimental applications of topoi typical of modern Fantastika. In Sny i kamienie (1995; trans Bill Johnston as Dreams and Stones 2004), a great City self-creates in the heart of the complex culture of a complex continent; W czerwieni (1998; trans Bill Johnston as In Red 2011) follows the "life" ...
Reed, Carmen
(? -? ) US author in whose Earth's Empress and Victoria: A Romance of Two Queenly Souls and of a Revolt in Africa Against a Benign Government (1901) two narrative strands, perhaps unconvincingly, intertwine: a lightly fictionalized dramatization of the Boer War (1899-1902) and a Lost World tale set in the mid-Atlantic, where a Utopian civilization has adapted to life ...
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 ...