SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 15 December 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 11 December 2025
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Varley, John
(1947-2025) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Picnic on Nearside" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for August 1974, and who was soon thought to be the most significant new sf writer of the late 1970s. He was fresh, he was complex, he understood the imaginative implications of transformative developments like cloning (see Clones) and Identity Transfer, many of ...
Reese, Jenn
(1970- ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Valkyrie" in Sword and Sorceress XVII (anth 2000) edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley; many of her best stories were assembled as Tales of the Chinese Zodiac (coll of linked stories 2006 ebook); Jade Tiger (2006) is a martial arts fantasy. Of sf interest is the Young Adult Above World ...
Space: 1889
Role Playing Game (1988). Game Designers' Workshop (GDW). Designed by Frank Chadwick. / Space: 1889 is an early example of Steampunk, set in an Alternate History whose central conceit is that many of the now discarded scientific theories of the Victorian age were actually correct. So, in this universe, Thomas Alva Edison invents an ...
Lederer, William J
(1912-2009) US soldier and author, most famous for a nonfantastic novel, The Ugly American (1958) with Eugene L Burdick. Of sf interest is Sarkhan (1965; vt The Deceptive American 1977) with Eugene L Burdick, a Near Future tale set in the fictional South-East Asian state of Sarkhan featured in The Ugly American, and now subject to Communist ...
Ford, Douglas Morey
(1851-1916) UK author whose Future War tale, A Time of Terror: The Story of a Great Revenge (A.D. 1910) (1906; vt A Time of Terror: The Story of a Great Revenge (A.D. 1912) 1908) as Anonymous, pits the anarchist League of London against the British government, the rioters' near victory aborted by the outbreak of war with Germany. In The Raid of Dover: A Romance of the Reign of Woman: A.D. 1940 (1910) as Anonymous, a ...
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 ...