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Sunday 14 June 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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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Nations, Opal L
(1941- ) UK-born author and music critic, in Canada for many years, active from the end of the 1960s and beginning to publish work of genre interest with "Juan Fortune" in New Worlds for January 1969. Strange Faeces (1970-1980), his little magazine of experimental fiction, poetry and art, published Kathy Acker, Thomas M Disch, Marilyn ...
Ambrose, David
(1943- ) UK author and screenwriter, with more than twenty film credits before the turn of the century, including the script for Amityville 3-D (1983). He also scripted the television Alternative 3 (1977) and directed one film for television, Comeback (1987), a borderline medical thriller whose focus on abnormal Psychology prefigures much of his fiction. ...
Stoker, Bram
(1847-1912) Irish author, civil servant, theatrical manager closely associated with Henry Irving and the actress Ellen Terry, and playwright. He is best known as the author of Dracula (1897; rev with cuts 1901), the classic Vampire novel. Although his fantasies are in the weird and occult fields, his writings do contain sf elements. These, however, are generally treated as products of Magic rather than of science, as in ...
Christopher, Edgar Earl
(? -? ) US author of The Invisibles (1903), narrated in retrospect from the Near Future, as an American-based secret society, The Invisible Hand, advances its plot to overthrow the Czarist government of Russia, aided by various Inventions of its Scientist membership, including an advanced submarine, which has been constructed by the Invisibles's leader, a ...
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 ...