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Wednesday 11 March 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 March 2026
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Kirk, Laurence
Pseudonym of Scottish naval officer and author Eric Andrew Simson (1895-1956), who was in active service during World War One and also published under his own name. His fiction as Kirk includes one sf novel, The Gale of the World (1948), set in a Near Future England where a scientific Discovery threatens the stability of the world. [JC]
Delany, Martin R
(1812-1885) US physician, soldier, newspaper editor, author and advocate of Black rights, during a period when it was anything but safe for an African-American to speak out (though he was born free, his mother broke the law when she taught him to read and write). Success in each of his several fields of endeavour was fraught with risk, as his patent accomplishments deeply affronted white Americans; student protests caused his removal from medical studies at Harvard in 1850, with the connivance ...
Le Plongeon, Alice Dixon
(1851-1910) UK photographer, traveller, amateur archaeologist and author who, with her husband Augustus Le Plongeon (1826-1908), spent from 1873 to 1885 in Mexico and South America, photographing still-extant ruins (over 2000 negatives, held in various archives, have survived); and suggesting on a Eurocentric diffusionist model that the pre-Columbian civilizations of America were copies of the civilization of Atlantis. Her interest in ...
Sherrell, Carl
(1929-1990) US commercial artist and, later, author whose novels are essentially fantasies, with the exception of the unremarkable The Space Prodigal (1981), a Space Opera with a haunted, roaming anti-hero (see Heroes). His fantasies are the Raum sequence – Raum (1977) and Skraelings (1987), Raum being a similar anti-hero – plus Arcane (1978) and ...
Vaquerizo, Eduardo
(1967- ) Spanish author, considered one of the best Spanish science fiction writers. He published nine sf and fantasy novels, three collections and about eighty short stories and novellas. He contributed to important anthologies, such as Antología de la ciencia ficción española 1982-2002 ["Anthology of Spanish Science Fiction 1982-2002"] (anth 2003) edited by Julián Díez, ...
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 ...