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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Gratacap, Louis Pope
(1851-1917) US naturalist, museum curator and author whose first writings were nonfiction essays like "The Ice Age" for the Popular Science Monthly in 1878. His first sf novel, The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars: Being the Posthumous Papers of Bradford Torrey Dodd (1903), remains his best known. Dying in the conviction that dead humans transcendentally ascend to a Martian Reincarnation as embodied spirits, the narrator's father is soon ...
Urban Legends
Modern oral folklore – also spread via newspapers, photocopier graffiti and, now predominantly, the Internet (see Creepypasta). An urban legend is typically a Tall Tale [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] with a frisson of deserved comeuppance or Horror, very often related as having actually happened to a "friend of a friend" – a ...
Peck, Richard E
(1936- ) US author and academic and university administrator, an active critic of both literature in general and sf in particular. He began publishing sf with "In Alien Waters" in Venture for November 1969. His sf novel, Final Solution (1973), is an amusing but grim tale in which a US academic is sent fifty years into the future (through Cryonics) to find universities and ...
Bisson, Terry
(1942-2024) US author who also worked as a New York publishing copy-writer. His first novel, Wyrldmaker: A Heroic Romance (1981), is a too rapidly told but intermittently dazzling Generation Starship tale told in the guise of a heroic fantasy (see also World Ship). With his second, Talking Man (1986), he came into his full powers as a novelist whose narrative voice was urgently and lucidly that ...
Sapien, Nick
(? - ) US author whose first sf novel, Drosophila (2005), explores a traditional sf topos – the society where social strata are determined by IQ tests, in this case administered at birth by an "IQ machine" – and whose protagonist, employed in Genetic Engineering, smells a rat. Truth City (2011) similarly focuses on a "Truth Machine" which is designed to creat ...
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 ...