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Tuesday 22 April 2025
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 21 April 2025
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Broderick, Damien
(1944-2025) Australian author, editor and critic; he had a PhD in the semiotics of fiction, science and sf with special reference to the work of Samuel R Delany. He edited four anthologies of Australian sf: The Zeitgeist Machine (anth 1977), Strange Attractors (anth 1985), Matilda at the Speed of Light (anth 1988) and Centaurus: The Best of Australian Science Fiction (anth ...
MacFadyen, Virginia
(1900-1966) US actress and author whose At the Sign of the Sun (1925) is a Lost Race tale whose inhabitants whose lineage is antediluvian. [JC]
Carroll, Lewis
Pseudonym of UK photographer, mathematician and author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898), whose famous children's stories, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1871) – an early example of the novel (sf or otherwise) structured around the moves of a game of Chess – have had a profound impact on a wide range of writers, over and above the numerous ...
Smith, Russell J
(1972- ) UK author of The Phenomenon (2007), a Near Future sf tale, set in a world already beset by Climate Change, which is afflicted by a "disease" whose victims broadcast their thoughts (see Telepathy) involuntarily. [JC]
Anna Livia
Working name of Irish author, teacher and editor Anna Livia Julian Brawn (1955-2007), in the UK from her teens and in the US from 1990, latterly a lecturer in French at the University of California, Berkeley; a lesbian feminist of radical views, which she has advanced in tales of considerable wit, though at book length her effects become uneasy. Her second novel, Accommodation Offered (1985), invokes a spirit world which has a ring of fantasy. Her third, Bulldozer Rising ...
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 ...