SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 5 October 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 5 October 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Cooper-Burnett, Christy
(? - ) US author whose Christine Stewart Time Travel Adventures sequence, beginning with No Way Home: A Time Travel Novel of Adventure and Survival (2020), is based on the premise that a distant Near Future world punishes its criminals (see Crime and Punishment) by transporting them into past eras. The protagonist is an enforcer, and gets into complex trouble ...
Miniaturization
A favourite area of Imaginary Science in sf is the shrinking or other transference of living protagonists to miniature, microscopic or even subatomic stature, leading to adventures at the appropriate scale (see Great and Small). Scientific rationales for the process are not easy to construct, since the major obstacles include the basic Physics of mass/energy conservation. Thus authors may ...
Swan, Christopher
(1946- ) US author whose Near Future tale of redemptive Ecology, YV88 (1977) with Chet Roaman, describes the transformation of the eponymous Yosemite Valley National Park by 1988 into an enclave no longer savaged by roads, rampant tourism, exploitation. A light railroad system replaces cars; the environmentally destructive O'Shaughnessy Dam. The vision was attractive, but as advocacy the book failed ...
McKeone, Lee
(1937-2007) US author of the Ghoster sequence of Space Operas – Ghoster (1988), Backblast (1989) and Starfire Down (1991) – set in undemanding interstellar venues where human entrepreneurs may comically flourish. McKeone subsequently concentrated on Ties, including the Birthright sequence tied to the Role Playing Game and signed ...
Wade, Tom W
(? - ) UK author who published mainly with sf publishers John Spencer (see Badger Books) under various pseudonyms. As Victor Wadey he wrote two bad yet charming sf novels, A Planet Named Terra (1962) and its sequel The United Planets (1962). The distant planet confusingly called Terra is populated by the Reincarnations of people from Earth, notably Elizabeth I, ...
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 ...