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Wednesday 11 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 ...
Green Planet
US Comic (1962). One issue. Charlton Comics. 36 pages. Artists include Dick Giordano, Charles Nicholas and Rocco "Rocke" Mastroserio. Scripts probably by Joe Gill. Three comic strips and a two-page text story. / Nearly two-thirds of the comic are taken up by the title story, adapted from Joan Hunter Holly's novel The Green Planet (1960). Jason Tolliver and Kathy Carpenter ...
White, Alan
(1924-2003) UK author, almost exclusively of thrillers, often in a war setting, his best known novel probably being A Long Day's Dying (1962); his several pseudonyms, which include James Fraser, Alec Haigh, Joe Balham and others, were used only for nonfantastic works. Of sf interest is Black Alert (1985), a Near Future Technothriller in which a renegade soldier, who has gained control of a military ...
Ex Machina
Role Playing Game (2004). Guardians of Order. Designed by Bruce Baugh, Rebecca Borgstrom, Christian Gossett, Bradley Kayl, Michelle Lyons. / Ex Machina is a game of all the many Cyberpunks, from the alternate 1980s of William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) and Walter Jon Williams's Hardwired (1986) through ...
Mendelsohn, Felix, Jr
(1906-1990) US author of two unremarkable comic sf novels, Club Tycoon Sends Man to Moon (1965) and Superbaby (1969). The former, in its spoofing of the space race (see Space Flight), sometimes scores an amusing point; the latter similarly spoofs Genetic Engineering in a tale involving the New York Metropolitans, a terrible Baseball team and the created ...
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 ...