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Saturday 14 March 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 March 2026
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Conquest, Joan
(1883-1941) Pseudonym of UK author Mary Eliza Louise Cooke (Mrs Leonard Cooke), born Mary Eliza Gripper and also known as Sister Martin-Nicholson following her first, brief marriage in 1907 to Allen Martin Reuben Nicholson (1883-1915); she married Leonard Cooke in 1915. She is known for floridly euphemistic (though superficially daring) novels of high romance, typical of which are Leonie of the Jungle (1921), whose eponymous heroine escapes the ...
Stead, Rebecca
(1968- ) US author whose Young Adult novels of sf interest include First Light (2007), where a boy, visiting Greenland with his scientist father to measure global warming (see Climate Change) meets a young Culture Hero woman from an Underground Utopia who wants to lead her people back into the light; and When You Reach Me ...
de Régnier, Henri
(1864-1936) French author, from the mid-1880s a member of the Symbolist Movement, whose members included Gustave Kahn as well as more famous figures like Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898), creating in Le Bosquet de Psyché ["Psyche's Arbor"] (1894) a significant presentation of the Symbolist ethos; in this context, he was a poet of importance. His prose works, which somewhat resemble those of his contemporary, Remy ...
Chait, Gavin
(1974- ) South African chemist, economist and author, in UK from around 2008, whose sf novel Tartarus Falls (2015 ebook; vt Lament for the Fallen 2016) locates a seeming First Contact event in Near Future Nigeria, where the survivor of a crash from space turns out to be a human-like, possibly Immortal ...
Air Wonder Stories
US letter-size Pulp magazine, 11 issues, July 1929-May 1930, Stellar Publishing Corporation, edited by Hugo Gernsback, managing editor David Lasser. / This was a prompt comeback by Gernsback after the filing of bankruptcy proceedings against his Experimenter Publishing Company, with which he had founded Amazing Stories. Air Wonder Stories announced itself in its ...
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 ...