SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 13 April 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 6 April 2026
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Stevens, Gordon
(1945- ) UK journalist, Television producer and author of political thrillers; of sf interest is And All the King's Men (1990), a Hitler Wins tale in set in an Alternate History Britain invaded by Germany in 1939; a resistance movement begins, and is successful by the middle of 1942. [JC]
Sullivan, Alan
(1868-1947) Canadian engineer, poet and author in the UK from around 1920 to 1940; prolific in various genres from 1891, including popular fiction as Sinclair Murray. Works of some interest include The Jade God (1924), In the Days of Their Youth (1926), a Posthumous Fantasy [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below], The Magic Makers (1930), in which Eskimos are overawed by ...
Hofstadter, Douglas
(1945- ) US academic and computer scientist, currently professor of cognitive science at Indiana University, whose massive popular-science book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979) won a Pulitzer Prize and has influenced sf thinking about Computers and AI. GEB, as it is often abbreviated, explores related Paradoxes of recursion – Hofstadter ...
Kost, Bruce
(1950- ) US merchant sailor and author whose first novel, the Military SF tale Reclusive Authority (1998), carries a tough female into space with her elite male buddies to fight off Aliens; in The Youngblood Project (2002), which is a tale of Near Future justified Paranoia, a man is kidnapped by the CIA, forced to ingest a ...
Brunner, John
(1934-1995) UK author, mostly of sf, though he published several thrillers, contemporary novels and volumes of poetry [see Checklist below]. He began very early to submit sf stories to periodicals – several appeared under the working name K Houston Brunner, based on his own middle names – and when he was 17 published his first novel, Galactic Storm (1951) under the House Name Gill Hunt. Even in a field ...
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 ...