SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 15 June 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 15 June 2026
Sponsor of the day: Paul Giamatti
Yolen, Jane
(1939-2026) US author, partially resident in Scotland, who began publishing poems and articles when still in college, and who first came to notice with books for children, the first of many being Pirates in Petticoats (1963). Of her circa 460 titles, many of which won awards in her field, most were for children (see listing below for some of these), many of them being picture books for younger children; most of her adult fiction, of which she wrote relatively little, was ...
Cooper, James Fenimore
(1789-1851) US author, best known for the Leather-Stocking Tales sequence in a gentlemanly frontier-adventure tale style, a set of essentially nonfantastic proto-Westerns which includes The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and many other widely read novels featuring the woodsman Natty Bumppo; he also wrote several Gothic tales containing supernatural elements, like the broad hints that the protagonist of The Spy, a Tale of the Neutral Ground ...
Roberson, Chris
(1970- ) US publisher and author, who founded Clockwork Storybook, a print-on-demand (pod) publisher, in 2000, through which he published his first books, Voices of Thunder (coll 2000), Cybermancy Incorporated (coll of linked stories 2001), and the first of his Celestial Empire sequence most of whose episodes are set in an Alternate History dominated by a China that had never isolated itself from the ...
Agell, Charlotte
(1959- ) Swedish-born author, raised in Canada and Hong Kong, in US from 1977. Author of several picture books for younger children, and of Shift (2008), a Young Adult novel set in a Dystopian America, some time after a nuclear Holocaust has devastated the Eastern Seaboard; fundamentalist Christianity (see Religion) has taken over the ...
Kaufman, Amie
(1980- ) Australian author, much of whose work has been in collaboration with Jay Kristoff or Meagan Spooner, most of her output being confined to Young Adult series. She is of sf interest for the Starbound sequence beginning with These Broken Stars (2013) with Spooner, the traditional lines of whose Space Opera ...
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 ...