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Thursday 12 June 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 9 June 2025
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Longyear, Barry B
(1942-2025) US author and editor who ran a printing company with his wife before beginning to write in 1977, beginning to publish work of genre interest with "The Tryouts" in Asimov's for November/December 1978. Before his 1981 hospitalization for alcoholism and addiction to prescription drugs – an experience which formed the basis of his non-sf novel Saint Mary Blue (1988) – he had already published prolifically, sometimes as by Frederick ...
Saffron, Robert
(1918-1985) US journalist, television screenwriter and author of The Demon Device: A Novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as Communicated to Robert Saffron (1979), a mildly speculative Alternate History set in World War One, with Arthur Conan Doyle sent off by his government to destroy a German secret Weapon; he is successful. [JC]
Moran, Daniel Keys
(1962- ) US author who began publishing sf with "All the Time in the World" in Asimov's for May 1982, a tale which he expanded with other material into his first novel and the first volume of the projected Tales of the Great Wheel of Existence series, The Armageddon Blues: A Tale of the Great Wheel of Existence (fixup 1988). The story begins in an unremarkable Ruined Earth America ...
Johnson, Stanley
(1940- ) UK politician, businessman, environmentalist and author. His novels, beginning with Gold Drain (1967), tend to be political/spy thrillers, some of which are sufficiently explorative to be thought of as Technothrillers. The Marburg Virus (1982; vt The Virus 2020) follows the efforts of an epidemiologist to trace an incipient Pandemic back to its source, with a ...
Werlin, Nancy
(1961- ) US author, primarily of Young Adult fantasy, including the Scarborough Fair sequence [see Checklist]. Of sf interest is Double Helix (2004), whose young protagonist discovers that he is the subject of an illicit experiment in Eugenics designed to apply a molecular biologist's Inventions in the field of ...
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 ...