SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 13 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
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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 ...
Indick, Ben
(1923-2009) US fan, involved as a fan with American sf from before World War Two, and a member of First Fandom; he began publishing fiction of genre interest with "The Road to Dunwich" for Ibid in 1973, and remained moderately active as a short fiction writer for three decades. He is of sf interest as well for his nonfiction, which includes The Drama of Ray Bradbury (1977; rev vt Ray Bradbury: Dramatist 1989), and ...
Meredith, James Creed
(1875-1942) Irish judge, a Protestant who was an early supporter of Sinn Féin; as an author, he focused usually on philosophical subjects, and carried that interest into fiction in The Rainbow in the Valley (1939), which features scientists in western China who establish Communications with Mars, giving Meredith the chance discursively to compare and contrast the two civilizations in terms of their attaining ...
Hartman, Emerson B
(?1888/1889-1969) US author whose Lunarchia: That Strange World Beneath the Moon's Crust (1937) began a projected six-volume interplanetary sequence in the Edgar Rice Burroughs vein with the discovery of a colourful civilization within the Moon. No further volumes appeared. In The Giant of the Sierras (1945) a Lost World is discovered in California inhabited by giants, ...
Ellis, T Mullett
(1850-1919) UK architect, politician, poet and author of various works, two being of sf interest. Reveries of World History: From Earth's Nebulous Origin to its Final Ruin; Or, the Romance of a Star (1893) is an elated quasi-fictional text evocative of the work of Camille Flammarion; in his Spectrum of Fantasy 2 (1994), George Locke argues for its relevance as an sf "prose poem". Zalma ...
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 ...