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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.
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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 ...
Fantomah, Mystery Woman of the Jungle
US Comic strip created by Fletcher Hanks under the pseudonym Barclay Flagg. First appeared in Jungle Comics #2 (February 1940); last appearance in issue #51 (March 1944). The stories can be divided into three styles: original (issues #2-#15); jungle girl (#16-#26) and Egyptian queen (#27-#51) (see Ancient Egypt in SF). The first period, by some considerable margin, is the most interesting. / The original Fantomah's ...
MacGregor, Reginald James
(1887-1961) UK playwright and author of The Monkey-God's Secret (1924), whose sf content is undetermined; in later years, MacGregor, writing as R J McGregor (note spelling of surname), later published Knights of the Skies (1947), a Children's SF tale whose protagonists are rescued by an advanced Technology: a plane that is also being used to destroy warmongers worldwide. Under the same name, he released ...
Sapkowski, Andrzej
(1948- ) Polish Fantasy author who has published only two sf stories, but whose work has become first nationally then internationally nearly as successful as that of Stanisław Lem and had an unprecedented impact on Polish Fantastika of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. / Sapkowski was born and raised in Łódź, a major industrial centre ...
Gerard, Morice
Pseudonym of UK clergyman and author John Jessop Teague (1856-1929), author of many historical novels, and of The New Order (1917), a vision of the Near Future from a staunchly rightwing perspective. [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 ...