SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 9 February 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 9 February 2026
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Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
O'Neill, Joseph
(1878-1952) Irish educationist and author, active from around 1905; Permanent Secretary to the Department of Education, Irish Free State, 1923-1944. His first book, The Kingdom-Maker: A Verse Play in Five Acts (1917) as by Seósamh O'Neill, is a drama about the founding of Ireland featuring somewhat fantasticated Firbolgs. He was the author of three novels of sf interest, though Wind from the North (1934) is only marginally fantastic, its narrator passing ...
Richards, Lysander Salmon
(1835-1926) US author of Breaking Up; Or, the Birth, Development, and Death of the Earth and its Satellite in Story (1896), a title evoking the cosmological perspectives of an author like the then popular Camille Flammarion, and the epic history being unpacked is intermittently "narratized", to give sentient interest, the viewpoint character being a dead but observant Alien from another star who tracks the ...
Haley, Guy
(1973- ) UK author whose Richards & Klein Investigations sequence – comprising the short Nemesis Worm (2011 ebook), Reality 36 (2011) and Omega Point (2012) – features the eponymous noir detectives, one an AI and the other an Android, in a complexly delineated distant Near Future marked by the multiplex layers of reality and ...
Emmons, Cai
(1951-2023) US playwright and author, most of whose work was nonfantastic, though the disruptions of familial emplacedness that featured throughout her work continued to structure her late work, the exercises in planet-facing Fantastika that started with the very Near Future Weather Woman sequence beginning with Weather Woman (2018). The protagonist of the tale discovers that, at a time of crisis due to ...
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 ...