SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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. ...
Saberhagen, Fred
(1930-2007) US author and editor, in the latter capacity with the Encyclopedia Britannica 1967-1973, for which he wrote the original entry on sf. He began publishing sf with "Volume PAA-PYX" in Galaxy for February 1961, and was active from that date, soon releasing the first of his many novels, The Golden People (1964 dos; exp 1984), a Space Opera involving Psi Powers. As an ...
Kaufman, Amie
(? - ) Australian author much of whose work has been in collaboration with Jay Kristoff or Meagan Spooner, most of her output being confined to Young Adult series. She is of sf interest for the Starbound sequence beginning with These Broken Stars (2013) with Spooner, the traditional lines of whose ...
Speer, Flora
(1933- ) US author of romantic fictions, mostly nonfantastic, almost all published in the last decade of the twentieth century. Her first series, the loose Dulan's Planet sequence of Planetary Romance tales beginning with Destiny's Lovers (1990), presents a set of love stories and intrigues connected through Dulan's Planet, so-named after the archivist who long before (see ...
Carr, Charles
Pseudonym of Sydney Charles Mason (1901-1985), a prolific UK author – primarily of Westerns under a variety of names including Colt Henderson and John Langley. His two Bel novels, Colonists of Space (1954) and its sequel Salamander War (1955), routinely deal with colonizing humans and their conflicts with the original salamander inhabitants of the planet Bel (see ...
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 ...