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Sunday 7 June 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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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Ellison, Harlan
(1934-2018) US author, the most controversial and among the finest of those writers associated with sf whose careers began in the 1950s. For many years he insisted that he was not in fact primarily an sf writer, and indeed most of his large oeuvre is better described as nonfantastic, or Fantasy, or Horror; but his influence on the field – or more accurately perhaps his example, as he became famous through writing little but ...
Skinner, Martyn
(1906-1993) UK poet whose first published book, Sir Elfadore and Mabyna: a Poem in Four Cantos (1935 chap) anonymous, is an archaized romance set in Faerie. He remains best known for the three volumes of Letters to Malaya (coll 1941 chap, coll 1943 chap and coll 1947 chap), though his most ambitious works were two long narrative poems. The Return of Arthur sequence – comprising Merlin; Or, the Return of Arthur: A Satiric Epic ...
Pertwee, Roland
(1885-1963) UK actor, playwright, screenwriter, painter and author, related to many Pertwees, including his son Jon Pertwee (1919-1996), an early Doctor Who (see Doctor Who); in active service during World War One. His Near Future Scientific Romance, MW.XX.3. (1929; vt Hell's Loose 1929; vt The Million Pound Cypher ...
Martinière, Stephan
(1962- ) French artist, later a resident of America. After some brief training in animation, he went to work for DIC Entertainment in the mid-1980s, temporarily requiring him to move to Japan, and he was soon contributing to a number of animated series, including Inspector Gadget (1983-1986), Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors (1985), MASK (1985), The Real Ghost Busters (1986-1991), and Madeline ...
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 ...