SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 10 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
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
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 ...
Afterblight Chronicles, The
A loose Shared World for Young Adult readers, devised by Jonathan Oliver of Rebellion and published by that company's Abaddon imprint. The setting of The Afterblight Chronicles is in Post-Holocaust times following a devastating worldwide Pandemic: cultists and warlords clash in the resulting Ruined Earth scenario. The ...
Grant, Robert
(1852-1940) US judge and author chiefly remembered for Unleavened Bread (1900). With John Boyle O'Reilly (1844-1890), an Irish writer who escaped Australian exile to live in the USA, J S of Dale (a pseudonym of US lawyer and diplomat Frederic Jesup Stimson) and J T Wheelwright (1856-1925), also a New England lawyer, Grant wrote The King's Men: A Tale of To-morrow (1884), set in a republican UK ...
Kubrick, Stanley
(1928-1999) US photographer and film-maker, resident in the UK from 1961. Born in New York, the son of a doctor, he early became obsessed with photography; Look magazine was buying work from him before he left high school. Motion pictures became his dominant interest, and he left Look after four years to make two short films with his own money and then two feature films, Fear and Desire (1953) and Killer's Kiss (1955), borrowing the production money ...
Dream Theater
US prog rock band, formed in 1985 by guitarist John Petrucci (1967- ), bassist John Ro Myung (1967- ) and Michael Portnoy (1967- ). Their first album When Dream and Day Unite (1989) is an energetic reworking of classic 1970s prog-rock musical idiom, and included the long song "The Killing Hand", which concerns a future war between an evil genius and a messiah-figure. The various tracks on Images and Words ...
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 ...