SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 14 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.
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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Gerani, Gary
(1953- ) US author of works about Cinema and Television, and also screenwriter, who began publishing in the early 1970s in The Monster Times and similar Media Magazines. His Fantastic Television: A Pictorial History of Sci-Fi, the Unusual and the Fantastic from Captain Video to the Star Trek Phenomenon and Beyond ...
Chatterton, E Keble
(1878-1944) UK author, active from around the turn of the century, best known for nonfiction works on maritime history, and for his dramatic depictions of naval warfare; he commanded a navy mine-sweeper during World War One. Of his fiction, the Z-Rays sequence – comprising Through Sea and Air (1929), Adventurers of the Air (1930) and The Sky Riders (1930) – is of most sf interest, as a European ...
Fontenay, Charles L
(1917-2007) US newspaperman and author, born in Brazil and raised in Tennessee from infancy, where he worked as a newspaperman for about half a century. He was a member of the If stable from the publication of his first story, "Disqualified", in September 1954, which he began much later to assemble in the incomplete Here, There and Elsewhen sequence of collected stories; he also wrote three somewhat routine sf novels over the next decade: Twice Upon a Time ...
Horsley, Reginald
(1858-1926) Australian author of Young Adult adventure tales, including The Yellow God: A Tale of Some Strange Adventures (1895), whose young heroes discover a Lost Race while sailing the Pacific. [JC]
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 ...