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Friday 20 June 2025
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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Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Heron-Maxwell, Beatrice
(1859-1927) UK author, an extremely prolific writer of stories, whose What May Happen: Stories Natural and Supernatural (coll 1901) contains some tales with speculative content, and whose The Queen Regent (1902) describes a Ruritania on an Island. [JC]
Vampires
This class of Supernatural Creature has effectively spawned its own subgenre, chiefly under the Fantasy rather than the sf umbrella; they may be concisely defined as "cannibalistic reanimated corpses". Vampires, Werewolves and other mythic Shapeshifters are endemic in the overlapping genres of Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance [for Brian ...
Tomlinson, Patrick S
(? - ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Dig Up the Vote" in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine #47 circa August/September 2010, followed by two Ties to the fantasy Videogame Abyss Walker. His first solo series, the Young Adult Children of Lost Earth sequence ...
Collins, Max Allan
(1948- ) US author, best known for mysteries and thrillers, many written as Max Collins; under that form of his name he also wrote the Dick Tracy comic strip from 1977 to 1993, assembling a good deal of this output – much of which features sf-like Inventions and Villains with assorted Superpowers – in graphic collections like ...
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 ...