SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 10 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
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
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 ...
Othmer, James P
(? - ) US advertising executive and author. The protagonist of his first novel, The Futurist (short version Fall 2004 Virginia Quarterly Review; much exp 2006), having lost faith in Futures Studies, is recruited in what may be the very Near Future by what may be an inscrutable government agency or in fact a cadre of Secret Masters ...
Itō Keikaku
Pseudonym of Japanese author Satoshi Itō (1974-2009), literally "Project Itō", usually transliterated as Project Itoh, whose first novel Gyakusatsu Kikan ["Genocidal Organ"] (2007; trans by Edwin Hawkes as Genocidal Organ 2012) was the runner-up in a new writers contest organized by the sf publisher Hayakawa. Heavily influenced by Cyberpunk, it posits a Near Future ...
Woodman, George
(? -? ) UK author of The Heretic (written circa 1938; 1963), a Dystopia where scientific progress has crippled the emotional life of the inhabitants of the new regime. [JC]
Fuller, Claire
(1967- ) UK sculptor and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "All Clear in the Anderton House" in After the Fall: Tales of the Apocalypse (anth 2014) edited anonymously. Her first four novels share a sense of dread that the ground may not hold, either in their protagonists' fragile lives, or in planetary terms, somewhere down the line. This aura may be most explicit in the first of these, Our Endless Numbered Days (2015), ...
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 ...