SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 16 July 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 14 July 2025
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Haley, Russell
(1934- ) UK-born author, in Australia from 1961 to 1966, and New Zealand subsequently. His work, from the poetry of the early 1970s on, has been Equipoisal (see Postmodernism and SF) as regards any fixing of generic content, notably in the stories assembled in ...
Faville, Barry
(1939- ) New Zealand author, mostly of work for the Young Adult market; his second novel, The Return (1987), is of sf interest for its depiction of the effects on an isolated New Zealand village of the Mysterious-Stranger-like visit of a young man whose nature and goals are obscure, but whose powers of Telepathy threaten to reveal the true nature of the ...
Blommedaal, Laurens J
(1956- ) Dutch-born UK author whose The Desperado of the Metal (1991) follows the adventures of a Cyberpunk protagonist through a noir Near Future Britain on the brink of extinction. [JC]
Identity
"Who am I?" "Am I who I think I am?" The unease inherent in such ancient philosophical queries has been exploited by sf authors in very many ways, ranging from melodramatic banality to genuinely subtle questioning of the nature of our sense of selfhood. Identity is lost or confused, usually temporarily, in Amnesia scenarios. It is juggled in stories of Identity Exchange and Identity Transfer, ...
Labatut, Benjamin
(1980- ) Netherlands-born author, most of whose life has been led in Latin America, currently Chile; his work, mostly speculative texts where an interlacing of fiction and nonfiction approaches to the fate of the world, may at times rhetorically evoke Futures Studies, though for the most part his incipits are nonfantastic. Some of the stories assembled in his first book, ...
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 ...