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Monday 16 February 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 9 February 2026
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Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Weybright and Talley
US publisher, which was founded in 1966 and sold circa 1973 to David McKay Publications, who dissolved the imprint. It is remembered for discovering John Boyd and publishing his first nine novels. / Victor Weybright and Truman Talley (1925-2013) served as publisher and editor respectively, as they had done at New American Library in the 1950s and the first half of the ...
Samuel, Maurice
(1895-1972) Romanian-born translator and author, in US from 1914, best known for nonfiction studies on Jewish culture and issues. King Mob: A Study of the Present-Day Mind (1930) as by Frank K Notch is an early assault on the totalitarian implications of a Media Landscape created by advertising, in league with governments aspiring to gain mind-control over their citizens. Samuel is of some sf interest for The Devil That Failed ...
Cash, Steve
(1946-2019) US country rock musician – he was lead singer for the Ozark Mountain Daredevils from its founding in 1972 – and author of The Meq sequence of sf novels, beginning with The Meq (dated 2003 but 2002), which describe, in fantasy-tinged diction, the lives of a kind of Pariah Elite which has hidden itself since time immemorial in the Basque lands of northern Spain. Meqs remain pre-adolescent until (at sight) they recognize ...
Gibson, William
(1948- ) US-born author, in Canada since 1968, when he moved north after being rejected by his draft-board. After some time in Toronto – where a significant proportion of his fellow expatriates had come in protest against the Vietnam War – he moved in 1972 to Vancouver, British Columbia, a Pacific Rim city where attention has for decades been uneasily focused upon increasingly dominant Japan (latterly China) across the waters. (It could be argued that 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 ...