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Tuesday 8 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.
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Bacheller, Irving
(1859-1950) US journalist, media entrepreneur (founder of the Bacheller Syndicate, which marketed stories to newspapers) and author, most of his fiction being regional tales set in upper New York State. Of sf interest is his first novel, The Master of Silence: A Romance (1892), whose young protagonist, raised in isolation, becomes a Superman whose Superpowers include Telepathy, which ...
Zentner, Alexi
(1973- ) Canadian author, now in USA, active since around 2007; he also writes as by Ezekiel Boone. His first novel, Touch (short version 2007 Tin House; 2011), is a fantasy set mostly in the Canadian north, in a small town where continued logging activities may be arousing chthonic wrath (see Gaia); The Lobster Kings (2014) re-enacts William Shakespeare's King Lear ...
Neeper, Cary
Working name of US microbiologist and author Carolyn A Neeper (1937- ) for her fiction, which consists primarily of the ambitious A Place Beyond Man (1975), which somewhat uneasily combines a Hard-SF rendering of the Physics and Biology of her interplanetary venues with a contemplative sweep characteristic of the Scientific Romance. ...
Frezza, Robert
(1956- ) US author who began publishing sf with "Max Weber's War" for Amazing, January 1987. The Small Colonial War sequence – comprising A Small Colonial War (1990), Fire in a Faraway Place (1994) and Cain's Land (1996) – replays the Boer War on a colony planet dominated by a Japanese-run interstellar empire, though without Kaffirs. The Imperial Japanese military forces, predictably, ...
Smythe, Alfred
(? -? ) UK author of A New Faust (1896; vt Van Hoff; Or, the New Faust 1897), whose protagonist discovers the secret of Immortality, which is given to him in a dream – or, perhaps, a binding vision of a Faustian bargain – by the Devil (see Horror in SF). He does not long enjoy his growing youthfulness. [JC]
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 ...