SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 10 May 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 4 May 2026
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Conway, Gerard F
(1952-2026) US author informally known as Gerry Conway who began his career in Comics, writing some non-fantastic scripts for Marvel Comics, and editing the short-lived 1973 weird fiction magazine The Haunt of Horror and writing for the 1973-1975 anthology Comic Worlds Unknown. He also worked extensively for ...
Wake, David
(1962- ) UK playwright, author and editor. While at university in the early 1980s he, along with fellow-student Rob Meades, defined and named the Drabble – a 100-word Flash Fiction story format. One hundred drabbles, many donated by sf authors including Isaac Asimov and Terry Pratchett, were collected as The Drabble Project (anth 1988) edited as ...
Backman, David
(? - ) US author, the protagonist of whose first novel, The Lightning in the Collied Night (2024), is mysteriously hurled a century up the line (see Time Travel) after undue proximity to a Black Hole which may contain a Wormhole. Sabotage is suspected. [JC]
Riggs, Ransom
(1979- ) US author whose Young Adult Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children sequence, beginning with Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2011) [for further details see Checklist below], smoothly juxtaposes fantasy and Alternate World topoi in a long narrative depicting the trials and tribulations of young Jacob Portman, his disrupted family, Miss Peregrine across the Atlantic ...
Boston, Bruce
(1943-2024) US poet (see Poetry) and prose author whose early work tended to the surreal, but who began – with stories like "Break" for New Worlds 7 (anth 1974) edited by Hilary Bailey and Charles Platt – to invoke fantasy and sf themes. His early poetry – much of it not genre at all, and almost all of it couched in a classically lucid voice – can most easily be ...
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 ...