SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 12 July 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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Herzl, Theodor
(1860-1904) Hungarian author, founder of Zionism in its modern form, perhaps most significantly in his nonfiction Der Judenstaat: Versuch einer modernen Lösung der Judenfrage ["The Jewish State: Proposal of a Modern Solution for the Jewish Question"] (1896 chap). The title of Simone Zelitch's novel, Judenstaat (2016), is taken directly from this work. / Herzl's fiction was also influential, beginning with the fictionalized ...
Dickberry, F
Pseudonym of French/Scottish author Anne Francoise Fernande Richards Eglatine Burnup (1854-1931), identified as Fernande Richards Eglatine Blaze de Bury in the 25 October 1905 San Francisco Call and perhaps elsewhere; she married James M Burnup in 1881. Her first novel, The Storm of London: A Social Rhapsody (1904), casually conflates sf and fantasy tropes in its depiction of a London where, after a giant storm, all ...
Langley, Patrick
(? - ) UK journalist, editor and author who is of sf interest for his first novel, Arkady (2018), set in a somewhat abstracted Near Future world, partly in an unnamed London, from which a poisonously Dystopian government oppresses a land increasingly transformed by Climate Change. Dreams of Arcadia shape the ...
Tanner, Charles R
(1896-1974) US clerk, salesman and author best known for his series featuring Tumithak, which began with "Tumithak of the Corridors" (January 1932 Amazing). Set in the fifty-third century, two millennia after Earth has been invaded by the shelks from Venus and mankind has been driven underground into a maze of deep tunnels. In that period humans have forgotten most of their previous advanced science. Tumithak, a young man, determines ...
Davis, Chandler
(1926-2022) US mathematician, academic and author, in Canada from 1960, after serving a short prison term for refusing to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee and subsequently losing his position as professor at the University of Michigan; in 1991, the university initiated the annual "Davis, Markert, Nickerson Lecture on Academic Freedom" (Mark Nickerson and Clement Markert had also been dismissed after refusing to testify). As a mathematician, he published many influential ...
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 ...