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Friday 13 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.
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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 ...
Cornwallis-West, G
(1874-1951) UK author, as well known for his marriages as for his fiction, his first (1900-1913) being to Jennie Churchill (1854-1921), mother of Sir Winston Churchill, whom he deserted for Mrs Patrick Campbell (1865-1940) as she was about to star in the London premiere of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion in 1914, and whom he deserted in turn in 1919, leaving huge debts behind. In his ...
Cărtărescu, Mircea
(1956- ) Romanian teacher, poet and author, active from around 1978. He is of some sf interest for his first novel, Visul ["The Dream"] (1989; uncensored version, vt Nostalgia 1993; trans Julian Semilian 2005), where an exorbitant use of the topoi of Fantastika are assembled (and re-assembled through the five disparate sections of the work) into a kaleidoscopic rendering of the ...
Cuba
Cuban sf is generally associated with its flourishing after the revolution of 1959, although the genre was already present in the island as early as 1875 with samples of the scientific novel. Francisco Calcagno (1827-1903) published the novel Historia de un muerto ["Story of a Dead Man"] (1875). Calcagno also published in 1888 En busca del eslabón: historia de monos ["Pursuing the Link: Story of Monkeys"] (1888). Some three decades later, the engineer Juan ...
Seeley, Charles Sumner
Pseudonym of US lawyer and author John William Munday (1844-1924), author of a Lost World novel for Young Adult readers, The Lost Canyon of the Toltecs: An Account of Strange Adventures in Central America (1893), in which a Toltec culture is discovered in the heart of Panama; the high priest resents the protagonists' Yankee Inventions, and calamity ensues. [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 ...