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Saturday 19 April 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.
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Janusz A Zajdel Award
The Polish Fandom Award was founded in 1984 at Polcon, the Polish national Convention, and named Sfinks, to be awarded for literary achievements in the field of science fiction (later also Fantasy) in the preceding calendar year, so the first award for the year 1984 was granted at the convention in 1985. However, only a month before Polcon '85 Janusz A ...
Hersey, John
(1914-1993) US author and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, born to missionary parents in China where he lived until he was ten; he is perhaps best known for his early book-length essay on the first use of the atomic bomb in warfare, Hiroshima (31 August 1946 The New Yorker; 1946), probably the first text to qualify as a "non-fiction novel", and the most illustrious example of the form. The Child Buyer (1960), a Near-Future ...
Tobey, Danny
(1976- ) US lawyer specializing in technology law with an emphasis on AI developments and medical issues, and author. In his first novel, The Faculty Club (2010), an elite American college is found to have gained its pre-eminence by the fact that, at its heart, a society of Secret Masters has from time immemorial been attempting to govern the world, partly through the enactment of voodoo rituals. ...
Itō Keikaku
Pseudonym of Japanese author Satoshi Itō (1974-2009), literally "Project Itō", usually transliterated as Project Itoh, whose first novel Gyakusatsu Kikan ["Genocidal Organ"] (2007; trans by Edwin Hawkes as Genocidal Organ 2012) was the runner-up in a new writers contest organized by the sf publisher Hayakawa. Heavily influenced by Cyberpunk, it posits a Near Future ...
Neil, John
(? -? ) UK author of at least two sf novels, each published obscurely: The Eye of the Gods (1933 chap); and The Man of Mystery (1934), featuring a surgeon, blinded in World War One, who evolves his "pineal" eye with the idea of beginning a three-eyed race of Supermen. [JC]
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 ...