SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 12 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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Ashing-Giwa, Kemi
(2000- ) US author who took her degree in integrative biology and astrophysics at Harvard and is currently working for a PhD at Stanford University. She began to publish work of genre interest with "Paper Suns" in Anathema: Spec from the Margins for September 2021. Her first novel The Splinter in the Sky (2023) is an intensely imagined Space Opera set in the aftermath of a failed war of interstellar conquest; following ...
Davidson, Michael
Pseudonym of Michael Zeik (? - ), US author of two sf novels: The Karma Machine (1975), a dystopian vision of a Computer-dominated world; and Daughter of Is: A Science Fiction Epic: An "Else-when" Parable (1978), an Alternate-History tale. Davidson should not be confused with the poet Michael Davidson (1944- ). [JC]
Nier: Automata Ver1.1a
Japanese animated tv series (2023). A-1 Pictures. Based on the action Role Playing Game Nier: Automata developed by PlatinumGames and published by Square Enix. Directed by Ryouji Masuyama. Written by Ryouji Masuyama and Yoko Taro. Voice cast includes Natsuki Hanae, Yui Ishikawa, Kaori Kawabuchi, Daisuke Namikawa, Tatsuhisa Suzuki, Atsumi Tanezaki and Aoi Yūki. Twelve 24 minute episodes. Colour. / We are told ...
Morris, Wright
(1910-1998) US photographer and author whose first books were "photo-texts" combining photos and fiction; in his later career he won the National Book Award twice, for The Field of Vision (1956) and Plains Song for Female Voices (1980). Of sf interest is The Fork River Space Project: A Novel (1977), in which something like the Near Future world, in the form of UFOs, interpenetrates a dreamlike ...
Ramón y Cajal, Santiago
(1852-1934) Spanish neuroscientist, artist and author; in his research into the structure of the micron, he established that the relationship between nerve cells was not continuous but contiguous, which has done something to save modern neurological science from excessively holistic presumptions; the Nobel Prize in medicine which he won in 1906 was primarily for this work. As a medical artist he was very well known; many of his drawings of the micro-architecture ...
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 ...