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 ...
Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders
Videogame (1988). Lucasfilm Games. Designed by David Fox. Platforms: Amiga, AppleII, AtariST, C64, DOS. / Zak McKracken is a graphical Adventure game with an interface similar to that of Maniac Mansion (1987). The player alternates between the roles of the titular Zak (a reporter for an American supermarket tabloid, the National Inquisitor), Zak's love interest, and her ...
Shepard, Lucius
(1943-2014) US author about whose first appearances in print there has been some confusion; he was credited with four stories and four articles in Collins Magazine (variously retitled Collins, the Magazine to Grow Up With and Collins Young Elizabethan) between 1952 and 1955, the first actual piece of fiction being "Camp Greenville" (January 1953 Collins, the Magazine to Grow Up With), where the author is listed (accurately) as being nine years old. Confusion was ...
Jones, Matt
(1968- ) UK producer and writer for Television, mostly for British programmes with no fantastic content: he acted as script editor for Russell T Davies's Queer as Folk (1999-2000). Since 1995, however, he has been variously involved with Doctor Who, publishing two novels for the franchise: The New Adventures: Bad Therapy (1996) and ...
Ayinde, M H
(? - ) UK author who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Techwork Horse" in Fiyah magazine for Winter 2021. Further short stories then appeared in other SF Magazines including Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and others, before publication of her first novel, ...
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 ...