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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 ...
Goodman, Alison
(1966- ) Australian author who began publishing work of genre interest with "One Last Zoom at the Buzz Bar" in The Patternmaker (anth 1994) edited by Lucy Sussex, and whose Young Adult sf novel, Singing the Dogstar Blues (1998), lightly sketches in the hard times inflicted upon a teenager by her Alien partner who engages in ...
Marmell, Ari
(1974- ) US author, mostly of series, beginning with the Corvis Rebaine sequence comprising The Conqueror's Shadow (2010) and The Warlord's Legacy (2011), which is military fantasy with sf touches in the descriptions of gear. Of marginally more direct sf interest is Iron Kingdoms Chronicle: In Thunder Forged: The Fall of Llael: Book One (2013), a Tie to the Videogame ...
Furniss, Clare
(? - ) UK author whose works for mature Young Adult readers begin with her first novel, The Year of the Rat (2014), whose young protagonist is haunted by the ghost of her mother, who has just died giving birth to an infant sister nicknamed The Rat. In her third novel, The Things We Leave Behind (2023), a teenaged girl must suddenly escape Near Future ...
Acworth, Andrew
(1857-1895) UK author – according to Darko Suvin, a barrister named Andrew Oswald Acworth – whose sf novel, A New Eden (1896), set 100 years in the future, features the escape of two depressed protagonists from the decaying republican UK, which has suffered from Devolution of the human stock, to an egalitarian but hidebound Island Utopia which fails ...
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 ...