SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 12 August 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.
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Crowley, John
(1942-2026) US teacher and author who also worked in documentary films and television for some time beginning in 1966. His sf novels have had a considerable impact on the field, and his fantasies established him as a figure whose work courteously but deeply stretched the boundaries of genre literature. / His first novel, The Deep (1975), is set on a flat discworld resting on a pillar that extends beyond measurement into the circumambient galactic Deep, in which very few stars ...
James, P D
(1920-2014) UK civil servant and author whose detective novels, beginning with Cover Her Face (1962) and generally featuring Commander Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard, comprise a literate, conservative, elegiac but tough-minded defence of traditional English civility, a vision darkened by the fact that the austere, deeply intelligent Dalgliesh is agnostic, and the England he defends is self-damaging. The hints of a high-tech sabotage of a coastal nuclear plant in ...
Cook, Paul
(1950- ) US poet and author whose infrequent sf stories began with "The Character Assassin" in Other Worlds #1 (anth 1979) edited by Roy Torgeson. In his first novel, Tintagel (1981), a virus transports its victims, by actualizing their response to Music, into fantasy worlds into which the protagonist, who is immune to the emotional effects of music, must enter in order to rescue ...
Sapkowski, Andrzej
(1948- ) Polish Fantasy author who has published only two sf stories, but whose work has become first nationally then internationally nearly as successful as that of Stanisław Lem and had an unprecedented impact on Polish Fantastika of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. / Sapkowski was born and raised in Łódź, a major industrial centre ...
Eno, Brian
(1948- ) Influential UK musician, associated with the invention of minimalist "ambient" musical styles. Much of his work is instrumental, and identifying it as sf is an unsure business, although there is a spacious and material "otherworldliness" about the best of Eno's ambient compositions that are certainly evocative in the same way that some sf is evocative. Another Green World (1975) perhaps filters perceptions of the Earth through an imaginary other ...
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 ...