SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 12 September 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 7 September 2026
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Kurodahan Press
Small Press begun in 2002 by three expatriate Westerners based in Japan, Kurodahan Press focused on bringing a wide range of Japanese texts to Anglophone readers. Kurodahan's goals, according to co-founder Edward Lipsett, were "to preserve and circulate contemporary and historical observations of Asia [and] produce informative and entertaining translations." Kurodahan published works in multiple genres including ...
Ole Luk-Oie
The best-known pseudonym of India-born UK military thinker and author Ernest Dunlop Swinton (1868-1951), who served in various capacities in the UK army from 1888 until he retired in 1919 with the rank of Major-General. His first book, The Defence of Duffer's Drift: A Few Experiences in Field Defence for Detached Posts Which May Prove Useful in Our Next War (1904 chap) as by Backsight Forethought, is couched as a sequence of fantasticated dreams in which Lieutenant Forethought ...
Illuminati
Card Game (1982). Steve Jackson Games (SJG). Designed by Steve Jackson. / Illuminati is a game of social satire, much influenced by Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! sequence, with one simple goal: take over the world. The spirit of Wilson's original trilogy is effectively invoked; the game abounds with ludicrous ...
Gibson, Gary
(1965- ) Scots author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Mother Love" in Skeleton Crew for March 1991, and whose first novel, Angel Stations (2004), neatly follows the pattern of the "new Space Opera", the kind of baroquely expansive tale which exfoliated in the late twentieth century and whose most comprehensive example may be Dan Simmons's Hyperion Cantos (omni ...
Kepler, Johannes
(1571-1630) German astronomer, one-time assistant to Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) and later imperial mathematician and astrologer to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II. Kepler's contribution to Astronomy – most notably his three laws of planetary motion – provided vital groundwork for Newton's cosmological synthesis. In 1593 he prepared a dissertation on the heliocentric theory, which explained how events in the heavens would 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 ...