SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 11 December 2024
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 December 2024
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Smythe, James
(1980- ) UK author who writes Young Adult fiction as J P Smythe; his first novel, Hereditation (2010) is an essentially nonfantastic Gothic set in New York. Of sf interest is The Testimony (2012), in which a Dystopian Near Future world is confronted with a seemingly irrefutable annunciation – perhaps in the very ...
O'Neill, John
(1964- ) Canadian author and editor, qualified in engineering and a former US software company manager, who was an editor at SF Site 1997-1999, before leaving to edit the new genre site Black Gate from late 2000 (Spring 2001 issue). He began publishing fiction of genre interest with "The Haunting of Cold Harbour" in Black Gate for Winter 2002, as by Todd McAulty. He is of sf ...
Haiblum, Isidore
(1935-2012) US author, born, educated and based in New York, where he set much of his fiction. The humour expressed in his novels is Yiddish in style (Haiblum was himself a Jew), especially in his first sf novel, The Tsaddik of the Seven Wonders (1971). Haiblum wrote a fluent though sometimes rather disarranged kind of comic sf, of which The Wilk Are Among Us (1975; rev 1979) is a representative example, with its amusingly overcomplicated plot, its frenetic ...
Millar, Ali
(1980- ) Scottish author, whose first book, The Last Days (2022), which is nonfiction, describes her upbringing as a Jehovah's Witness, and her apostasy (surprisingly late) as a married woman. She is of sf interest for her first novel, the Near Future Ava Anna Ada (2024), each of these palindromes beginning with the letter A. Britain is beset not only by exponential ...
Porter, Chana
(? - ) US teacher, playwright and author whose first novel The Seep (2020) interestingly places a clearly-told emotionally intense tale in which a trans woman discovers that her wife is effectively leaving her through the application of a new Technology that gives her rebirth as a child. The technology is one of the radical transformations enabled through the Invasion of an ...
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 ...