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Sunday 12 April 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.
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Television Anthology Series
The Television anthology series, with each segment presenting a new genre story or adaptation of some existing story, has frequently been attempted with varying degrees of success. The term is also applied to the format in which a regular slot with its own title hosts multiple series or serials, as with Cliffhangers (1979) below. Series which receive full or cross-reference entries in this encyclopedia are, in chronological order: / ...
Gold, Alan
(1945-2024) UK journalist and author, in Australia from 1970, active from 1975 onward. Most of his novels are historical thrillers; he is of sf interest for Bat out of Hell: An Eco-Thriller (2015), a tale of global Pandemic whose mutant virus, spread by bats, is one hundred per cent fatal. As panic grows the only countermeasure seems to be wholesale extermination of bats, a policy violently opposed by animal rights activists who duly become ...
Ukraine
Any account of Ukrainian Fantastika must distinguish between works written in Ukraine and works written in Ukrainian, a Venn diagram of contending linguistic and political forces. These include a sub-genre of "emigre" fiction, written in Germany, France, Canada and the United States up until the 1960s, works written in what is now the geographic territory of Ukraine, ...
Byrne, Eugene
(1959- ) Irish-born UK author whose first sf publication was "In the Air" in Interzone for January 1991 with Kim Newman, with whom he collaborated on other short fiction and on his first novel (see Kim Newman for discussion). He has also written under the name Myles Burnham (see Games Workshop). His first solo novel, ThiGMOO (June 1997 ...
Sinderby, Donald
Pseudonym of UK author Donald Ryder Stephens (1898-1983), in active service during World War One. The last of his five novels is Mother-in-Law India (1930), a Near-Future Scientific Romance in which the British Empire threatens to crack apart due to Britain's socialist government's foolish promise to give India her freedom (see Imperialism; ...
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 ...