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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 13 April 2026
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Versins, Pierre
The name adopted by French scholar, author and self-styled utopian Jacques Chamson (1923-2001), a survivor of Auschwitz. He began writing sf in the 1950s, publishing several novels, including Les étoiles ne s'en foutent pas ["The Stars Care"] (1954), En avant, Mars ["Forward to Mars"] (1955), Feu d'artifice ["Fireworks"] (Paris: Métal, 1955) and Le professeur ["The Professor"] (1956), and over 20 stories (some with his wife ...
Lethem, Jonathan
(1964- ) US author, married 1987-1998 to Shelley Jackson, who began publishing work of sf interest with "The Unexpurgated Zap Gun: A Report" for The Philip K Dick Society Newsletter #15 in 1987, the first of several pieces on Philip K Dick whose natural – though not inevitable – culmination was his editing for the Library of America three Dick omnibuses, beginning with ...
Dunn, Katherine
(1945-2016) US author, teacher and radio personality whose third novel, Geek Love (1989), is a densely told tale of a family which breeds its own circus freaks through a kind of Genetic Engineering; in the end the book reads, however, not primarily as sf (see Equipoise), but as an extremely expert Fabulation on the primordial theme of the family romance. Dunn's novel should not be ...
Ruck, Berta
(1878-1978) Indian-born author, in UK from an early age, married to Oliver Onions from 1909 until his death [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]; of some interest for stories published in various collections such as The Post-War Girl and Other Stories (coll 1922), A Wish a Day (coll 1956) and Sherry and Ghosts (coll 1961). Of more direct sf ...
Apple, A E
(1891-1963) US author of ramshackle crime thrillers, mostly at shorter lengths for Detective Story Magazine; these stories include a series featuring the Chinese Villain Mr Chang, something of a Yellow Peril figure though hardly in the Fu Manchu class. In the novel Mr Chang's Crime Ray: A Detective Story (9 April 1927 Detective Story Magazine; fixup 1928), Chang is ...
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 ...