SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 6 June 2023
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 6 June 2023
Sponsor of the day: Joe Haldeman
Hopkinson, Nalo
(1960- ) Jamaican-born author, in Canada from circa 1976, who began publishing work of genre interest with "A Habit of Waste" for Fireweed in 1996; this was assembled with other short work as Skin Folk (coll 2001), which was followed by Falling in Love with Hominids (coll 2015). Her first novel, Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), established her almost instantly as an author, winning a ...
Albano, Peter
(1922-2006) US author who served in the US Navy 1942-1946; he is known mainly for the nine-book Seventh Carrier sequence of Military SF adventures starring the World War Two Japanese aircraft carrier Yonaga, trapped for over forty years in a secret port by a shift of glacier ice. The crew and airmen, now mostly in their sixties, finally break free in late 1983. Owing to a rogue Chinese anti-missile system whose ...
White, Tim
Working name of British artist Timothy Don White (1952-2020). After artistic training at the Medway College of Design from 1968 to 1972, White worked in advertising for two years before receiving assignments to paint book covers for (principally) New English Library and Science Fiction Monthly; his first commission was for the 1974 Transworld/Corgi SF Collector's Library paperback of The Other Side of the Sky (coll 1958) by Arthur C ...
Identity Transfer
Transfer of the personality or Identity from one body to another is a popular sf theme, whether justified by Cartesian dualism (positing an immaterial personality or soul capable of existing independently of the body) or by the Computer analogy in which the mind is software running on the body's hardware or wetware. The protagonist of A E van Vogt's The World of Ā (August-October 1945 ...
Johnson, Toby
Working name of US author Edwin Clark Johnson (1945- ), whose Plague: A Novel About Healing (1987) is a Near Future medical thriller, and whose Secret Matter (1990; rev 2005) is a First Contact novel set in San Francisco after a devastating earthquake, the encounter leading to a clement gay Utopia. [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 ...