SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 5 March 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.
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Grant, Rob
(1955-2026) UK author, initially best known under the collaborative pseudonym Grant Naylor for his work on the Red Dwarf (1988-current) Television series (which see for discussion). Only one related novel, Grant's solo Backwards (1996), has not been published under this name; as the title suggests, the central sf theme in Backwards is that of ...
Green, Joseph
(1931-2026) US author of sf and technical journalism who also worked for NASA, and who began publishing sf with "The Engineer" in New Worlds for February 1962. An Affair with Genius (coll 1969) assembles some of his better early work. Since 1989 he also published short fiction in Analog, F&SF and other magazines as by Francis Marion Soty. Although many of his 70-plus stories (not all sf) have ...
Simmons, Dan
(1948-2026) US elementary school teacher circa 1971-1987 and author, who began publishing work of genre interest with "The River Styx Runs Upstream" in Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine for April 1982, and who was for some time thought of primarily as an author of tales of Horror, some of which – along with sf and Fantasy stories – were assembled ...
Perry Rhodan
German sf Space Opera series; individual instalments (mostly novellas) are published weekly by Verlagsunion Pabel Moewig (formerly Moewig-Verlag). Created by Walter Ernsting (who wrote for the series as Clark Darlton) and Karl-Herbert Scheer. Perry Rhodan began in 1961 and is still current: by the 2020s, more than 3000 short volumes in the main series describing ...
Futuristic Science Stories
UK pocketbook-size magazine, published by John Spencer, London. Edited by John S Manning, a pseudonym of publishers Samuel Assael and Maurice Nahum. 16 issues, numbered, undated, 1950-1958; #1-#15 appeared 1950-1954; #16 did not appear until 1958. / Futuristic Science Stories was one of four almost identical low-quality sf magazines – all of minimal interest – published by Spencer in the 1950s; the ...
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 ...