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Monday 16 March 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 March 2026
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Cicellis, Kay
Working name of Catherine Mathilda Cicellis (1926-2001), French-born author of Greek descent who writes in English. Her sf novel The Day the Fish Came Out (1967), which novelizes The Day the Fish Came Out (1967), is about an H-bomb and the consequences of its loss off a Greek island; it is not up to the standard of her serious work. [JC]
Land, Jon
(1957- ) US author, frequently of Technothrillers that maintain an edgy proximity to full sf, particularly in the Blaine McCracken series beginning with The Omega Command (1984) and ending with Dead Simple (1998), the last being typical in its use of an Invention just beyond current Technology – in this case a new explosive – to ...
Kirby, Jack
Pseudonym of US comic-book illustrator Jacob Kurtzberg (1917-1994), who was known as Jack Kirby from about 1940, though he does not seem to have taken that name legally; other early pseudonyms include Jack Curtiss, Curt Davis, Ted Grey, Lance Kirby and Fred Sande. One of the giants in the Comics industry, he began his more than fifty-year career in 1936 working on newspaper comic strips for the Lincoln Newspaper Syndicate; briefly, in 1939, he worked for Fleischer ...
Cowie, Donald
(1911-2006) UK author (blind since 1984), in New Zealand from 1928, in UK from 1934, resident in Switzerland from 1964, who has also written as Aldwyn Abberley, Julian Mountain, R F St B Pytchely and Rufus Stone; he was the author of several crabbed Future History visions of a century in decay. Prose & Verse (coll 1945) as with Julian Mountain contains some fantasy stories; of sf interest are ...
Rabe, Jean
(1957-2026) US game designer, author and editor who began to publish work of genre interest with "Grandfather's Toys" in Realms of Valor (anth 1993) edited by James Lowder, an anthology tied to the Forgotten Realms Shared World. Much of Rabe's work is tied to other fantasy and supernatural franchises such as Dragonlance and Rogue Angel [see Checklist below]; contributions to the latter sequence appear as by Alex ...
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 ...