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Sunday 13 July 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.
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Kelly, Ken
(1946-2022) Working name of US artist Kenneth William Kelly, who also signed works as Ken W Kelly and K W Kelly (though the unusual style of the latter signature misled some into incorrectly rendering his name as C W Kelly). A self-trained artist, Kelly served in the US Marines and, after returning to New York in 1968, garnered his first assignments with the help of his friend Frank Frazetta, to whom he was related in a convoluted manner and to whose studio ...
Waberi, Abdourahman A
(1965- ) Djiboutian journalist and author, mostly in France from around 1985; Le Pays sans ombre (coll 1994; trans Jeanne Garane as The Land Without Shadows 2005) assembles nonfantastic stories set in his native land. He is of sf interest for Aux États-Unis d'Afrique: Roman (2006; trans David and Nicole Ball as In the United States of Africa 2009), an Alternate World tale ...
Reverie, Reginald
Pseudonym of US author Grenville Mellen (1799-1841), whose extremely early volume of short stories, Sad Tales and Glad Tales (coll 1828), has been claimed as a shaping influence upon Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe. Of sf interest in the collection is a Satire, "The Meeting of the Planets", in which the planets talk among themselves about Homo sapiens; and "The ...
Shurkin, Joel N
(1938- ) US journalist (winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1979) and author whose very Near Future medical Technothriller, Helix (1979) with Desmond Ryan, extrapolates from the real effects of Legionnaire's Disease to depict a virulent nationwide Pandemic. [JC]
Fies, Brian
(? - ) US cartoonist and author whose Graphic Novel, Whatever Happened to The World of Tomorrow? (graph 2009), dramatizes the American dream of a Technology-led drive towards a Utopian future centred on a continuous move into space. The narrative traces from 1939 on a recognizable sf advocacy of early ...
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 ...