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Sunday 10 May 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 4 May 2026
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Conway, Gerard F
(1952-2026) US author informally known as Gerry Conway who began his career in Comics, writing some non-fantastic scripts for Marvel Comics, and editing the short-lived 1973 weird fiction magazine The Haunt of Horror and writing for the 1973-1975 anthology Comic Worlds Unknown. He also worked extensively for ...
Wood, Charlotte
(1965- ) Australian author whose work has generally been nonfantastic. Of sf interest is The Natural Way of Things (2015), set in a very Near Future Dystopian Australia and centering on a group of women first drugged (see Drugs) then forcibly confined to a Keep deep in the outback. They discover that they are being punished (see ...
D'Achille, Gino
(1935-2017) British artist, born in Rome, Italy. At the age of thirteen, he began his artistic training at Rome's Liceo Artistico and later attended the city's University of Architecture, explaining his later attentiveness to strange buildings and vehicles as well as undressed human figures and exotic animals in his book covers. Never a specialist in sf art, D'Achille moved to London in 1964 and initially worked mostly in animation, a field he returned to in the 1980s to design characters for ...
Wertham, Fredric
(1895-1981) German-born US psychiatrist and author whose name was legally changed from Friedrich Ignatz Wertheimer in 1927. He is best remembered for his part in the 1950s US outcry against horror and Superhero Comics, expressed in such articles as "What Parents Don't Know About Comic Books" (November 1953 Ladies' Home Journal) and "Blueprints to Delinquency" (May 1954 Readers Digest), and above all in his highly ...
Hamilton, Bernard
(1863-1930) UK barrister and author; father of Patrick Hamilton, who created several characters in several novels who reflected his spendthrift flamboyance and alcoholism. Hamilton's one work of any sf interest is The Light?: A Romance (1898), a heavily plotted tale set mostly in Ancient Egypt and partly, via obscurely explained Reincarnations, around 1870; ...
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 ...