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Friday 13 March 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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Chidgey, Catherine
(1970- ) New Zealand academic, translator and author, active from before 2000, moderately prolific in various genres. The Axeman's Carnival (2022), which is Fantasy, is narrated by a magpie. Of sf interest is The Book of Guilt (2025), an Alternate History whose Jonbar Point is the election in 1939 of a woman prime ...
Rees, Arthur J
(1872-1942) Australia author, later in the UK, whose first sf novel, The Shrieking Pit: Being the Mystery of the Golden Anchor Inn (1919), is a World War One thriller in which an Invention threatens to change the course of events. In his second, The Threshold of Fear: A Sober Fantasy (1925), which is told within a Club Story frame, a young man discovers an Asian ...
Kwan, Susanna
(? – ) US author whose first novel, the Near-Future Awake in the Floating City (2025), is partly sent in a flooded, Climate-Change-ridden San Francisco (see California), as seen primarily through a narrative emphasizing, without melodramatics, the art of surviving humanely in the new circumstances of the world. / Susanna Kwan ...
Lord, Jeffrey
House Name used for the 37-book Richard Blade Sword-and-Sorcery series "produced" by Lyle Kenyon Engel. Manning Lee Stokes wrote 1 to 8 of the sequence; 9-29 and 31-37 were by Roland Green; Ray Nelson contributed a single title, number 30 in the sequence. The ...
Schmitz, James H
(1911-1981) German-born author whose parents were American; in the US from 1938, serving with the USAF in World War Two; his first story was "Greenface" in Unknown for August 1943, whose offbeat titular Monster is the first of many in his works. From 1949, when "Agent of Vega" (July 1949 Astounding) appeared as the first of four stories featuring sentient Robot ...
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 ...