SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 16 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
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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 ...
Hornblower in Space
Sea stories of the Napoleonic war era, especially the Horatio Hornblower sequence by C S Forester, have long appealed to sf fans. Obvious parallels with Spaceship voyages include the frail and crowded vessel in a lethal environment, an assumed need for tight naval discipline, and a profusion of technical Terminology. Walt Willis in his column "Fanorama" ...
Gordon, Rex
Most frequently used pseudonym of UK author Stanley Bennett Hough (1917-1998) for his sf work, although under his own name he published the borderline Frontier Incident (1951); Mission in Guemo (1953), describing a resurgent Nazi conspiracy centred Lost-Race-like up the Amazon; the borderline-sf thriller Extinction Bomber (1956); and Beyond the Eleventh Hour (1961), a ...
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 ...
Venturini, Fred
(1980- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Threshold" (in Sick Things: An Anthology of Extreme Creature Horror, anth 2010, edited by Cheryl Mullenax), and whose Young Adult first novel, The Samaritan (2011; vt The Heart Does Not Grow Back 2014), also makes use of Horror in SF tropes to give verisimilitude to the story of a highschool ...
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 ...