SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 12 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 ...
Forbidden Lines
US Semiprozine published by Paul B Thompson, Chapel Hill, North Carolina and edited by Charles Overbeck supported by an editorial board consisting of a student-based writers' group at the University of North Carolina. It ran for 16 letter-size issues from October/November 1990 to Summer 1994, initially bimonthly but irregular after Fall 1992. The magazine began because the writers' group felt there were insufficient markets in the US for sf/fantasy and those few ...
World Fantasy Award
The World Fantasy Awards have been presented in various categories since 1975, for work first appearing in the previous year. Presentations take place at the annual World Fantasy Convention. Although the award is naturally biased towards Fantasy and horror, a number of sf or near-sf novels have been honoured, and most of the winning authors have entries in this encyclopedia. We therefore list the winners for best novel of the ...
Blumlein, Michael
(1948-2019) US medical doctor who worked full-time at UCSF until recently, and author whose output in the latter capacity, though he published only four novels and four collections, had considerable impact on the field, beginning with his first published story, "Tissue Ablation and Variant Regeneration: A Case Report" in Interzone for Spring 1984. This tale remains one of the most astonishingly savage political assaults ever published. The target is Ronald Reagan, ...
Restif de la Bretonne
Name by which the French author Nicolas-Anne-Edmé Restif (1734-1806) is usually known, though he sometimes signed his books N A E Restif de la Bretonne; his surname at birth was simply Rétif, without the spoof addition, which was the name of a family field. He was an extremely prolific author, publishing about 250 volumes in all beginning in 1767, including many formless, semi-autobiographical novels often attacked for imputed pornographic content. Of his ...
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 ...