SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 13 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
Sponsor of the day: Conversation 2023
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 ...
Marshall, William
(1944-2003) Australian author, best known for the long Yellowthread Street Mystery sequence beginning with Yellowthread Street (1975), set in a fictionalized Hong Kong and featuring the investigations of Detective Chief Inspector Harry Feiffer. The stories, though gonzo and gaudily unlikely, are generally nonfantastic, though Sci Fi: A Yellowthread Street Mystery (1981), which is set at an sf film Convention (see ...
Davenport, Benjamin Rush
(? -? ) US author, quite possibly a resident of Cleveland, Ohio, whose "Uncle Sam's" Cabins: A Story of American Life, Looking Forward a Century (1895) initially depicts a Near Future so biased toward capitalists that most Americans have become serfs; a Pandemic (see also Disaster) eventually gives a reformer the chance to create a more equitable ...
Burgess, Tony
(1959- ) Canadian performance artist (under the name Tony Blue) and author in whose first novel of sf interest, Pontypool Changes Everything (1998), a Meme-spread Basilisk destroys victims' ability to make sense through language: then they go mad. It was filmed as Pontypool (2008), and assembled with the more conspicuously surreal ...
Moffett, Cleveland
(1863-1926) US playwright and popular author, usually of detective stories but also of one of the most explicit Edisonades to appear in early-twentieth-century US sf. In The Conquest of America: A Romance of Disaster and Victory: USA, 1921 AD [for full title see Checklist] (1916), it is Thomas Alva Edison himself who saves the USA from decadent socialists, while fending off a threat of ...
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 ...