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Wednesday 9 July 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.
Site updated on 7 July 2025
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Ashton, Francis Leslie
(1904-1994) UK analytical chemist, painter and author whose first sf novel, The Breaking of the Seals (1946), sets a psychic time-traveller into a prehistoric world (see Prehistoric SF) where primitive society ends in chaos with the breaking up of Bahste, Earth's then Moon; a deluge follows. Its thematic sequel, Alas, That Great City (1948), set in Atlantis, propounds a ...
Zito, V M
(? - ) US advertising agency executive and author of The Return Man (2012), a Near Future Post-Holocaust novel set in the Evacuated States of western America four years after the now traditional Zombie holocaust has split America apart: gonzo zombies out West, which has become a no-man's-land, while the Safe States back East have been crushed into ...
Hamilton, Virginia
(1936-2002) US author, mostly of juveniles, and of very considerable interest in that field for the exploratory intensity of her work, from Zeely (1967) on, and for the depth of her presentation of the complex experience of being Black in the USA (her maternal grandfather was an escaped slave). Several of her better-known tales, like M.C. Higgins, the Great (1974) and Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush (1982), are fantasies. Of particular sf interest is the ...
Ralston, Gilbert
(1912-1999) Northern Ireland-born screenwriter and author, in America for many years, who may have sometimes written as by Stephen Gilbert (see Stephen Gilbert for discussion of the resulting confusion). It was, however, under his own name that Ralston wrote the screenplay for Willard (1971), the film of the 1968 novel by the "real" Stephen Gilbert, and for the sequel, Ben (script 1971; novelization 1972); in the 1970s he ...
Tracy, Louis
(1863-1928) Irish-born UK journalist and author, born Patrick Joseph Treacy, in UK from early childhood, active from the early 1880s. He almost certainly changed his name legally before 1888; his birth name and place of birth have been examined by Steve Holland in his Bear Alley blog [see links below]. Tracy is best remembered for The Final War: A Story of the Great Betrayal (28 December 1895-1 August 1896 ...
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 ...