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
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
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 ...
Bacon, Eugen
Working name of Tanzania-born computer scientist, editor and author Eugen Matoyo Bacon (1971- ), who lived for some years in the UK before moving to Australia; she began to publish work of genre interest with "Clone of Clones" as Eugen M Bacon, in Twisted Tails: An Anthology to Surprise and Delight (anth 2006) edited by J Richard Jacobs. Her first novel, Claiming T-Mo (2019), is an Equipoisal ...
Kleier, Glenn
(1949- ) US businessman and author in whose very Near Future sf novel, The Last Day (1997), what appears to be a female Messiah crashes from above into an Israeli lab in 1999, just short of the millennium, but may be in fact the climax of an attempt to Clone supermen (see Superman) and not Christ at all. [JC]
Neilson, Keith
(1935- ) US academic of importance in the field of sf and fantasy scholarship for editing (anonymously: both books were created under the umbrella editorship of Frank N Magill) the Survey of Science Fiction Literature [for subtitle see Checklist] (anth 1979 5vols) and the Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature (anth 1983 5vols); the first contains 500 and the second about 500 essays, averaging some 2000 words, on ...
UFO Incident, The
Made-for-tv film (1975). Universal/NBC. Directed by Richard A Colla. Written by S Lee Pogostin, Hesper Anderson, based on The Interrupted Journey (1966) by John G Fuller. Cast includes Beeson Carroll, Bernard Hughes, James Earl Jones, Dick O'Neill and Estelle Parsons. 100 minutes. Colour. / James Earl Jones (the voice behind Darth Vader in Star Wars) tried for years to secure the finance to make a film about this supposed UFO ...
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 ...