SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 14 August 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 10 August 2026
Sponsor of the day: David Cowhig
Crowley, John
(1942-2026) US teacher and author who also worked in documentary films and television for some time beginning in 1966. His sf novels have had a considerable impact on the field, and his fantasies established him as a figure whose work courteously but deeply stretched the boundaries of genre literature. / His first novel, The Deep (1975), is set on a flat discworld resting on a pillar that extends beyond measurement into the circumambient galactic Deep, in which very few stars ...
Schroeder, Andreas
(1946- ) German-born poet, broadcaster and author, in Canada from 1951; much of his work skirts various regions of Fantastika, including the fabulistic tales and parables assembled in The Late Man (coll 1972), his first volume of fiction, some of which are sf, and the more organized of which convey some of the surreal fixity of gaze of Franz Kafka. The protagonist of Dustship Glory ...
Skurzynski, Gloria
(1930- ) US author from the 1970s of fiction and nonfiction for Young Adult markets; in her first sf novel, Cyberstorm (1995), a young girl finds herself trapped in a Virtual Reality room meant to re-create a world of happy memories for its elderly owner; wrongness soon pervades the enclave. Skurzynski's Virtual War Chronologs sequence beginning with Virtual War (1997) ...
Smith, Garret
(1878-1954) US journalist, newspaper editor and author who was active with sf stories in magazines like The Argosy, where several novels appeared. Only Between Worlds (11 October-8 November 1919 Argosy Weekly; 1929), one of his weakest, reached book form; it is a semi-juvenile tale that begins on a Dystopian Venus as male explorers from its light ...
Foster, W Bert
(1869-1929) US author who specialized in the Dime Novel and several of whose Western tales were made into silent films; his sf of most interest – like "At Land's End" (May-November 1901 Argosy), a Near Future tale in which the Arctic is explored by airplane; and "When Time Slipped a Cog" (January-May 1905 All-Story), which combines ...
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 ...