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Wednesday 18 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 18 February 2026
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Dawson, Erasmus
The pseudonym of UK author Paul Devon (? -? ), of whom nothing is known beyond his authorship of The Fountain of Youth (1891), a Lost World tale set in Borneo, where a race of Hindu giants (see Great and Small) is discovered; they are notable for various Inventions, and for their use of a metal previously unknown to science. The tale is narrated by ...
Satō Michiaki
(? - ) Japanese artist specializing in sf novel Illustration and Mecha design for Anime. A former member of Studio Nue (see Naoyuki Katō; Haruka Takachiho), he received the Seiun Award for art in 1987, in which period he was largely known ...
Edwards, David
(? - ) US author whose Next Stop – Mars!: A Novel of the First Spaceship Voyage to the Red Planet (1959) sends another first space flight to Mars. He is unlikely to be the David Edwards who is the author of Dreams, Tales, & Lullabies: Stories from my Grandfather's House (coll 1985), an unremarkable collection with some fantasy content; and whose date of birth has been given as 1945. [JC]
Jacobson, Howard
(1942- ) UK academic, journalist and author, active in the latter capacity from the 1970s, his first novel being Coming from Behind (1983); perhaps to the detriment of his career as an author of the literary mainstream, he was identified from the first as a comic novelist, though The Finkler Question (2010) won what was by then called the Man Booker Prize. Fortunately, in his first sf novel there are only slight evidences of dissociation ...
Solar System
This encyclopedia deals with sf about our Solar System under the following headwords, moving conventionally outward from the Sun (see also Stars for a more general treatment of suns). There are individual entries for Mercury, Venus, the Moon but not the Earth itself – though links to a great many relevant entries are assembled under a cross-reference ...
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 ...