SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 16 February 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 16 February 2026
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Logsdon, Syd
(1947- ) US teacher and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "To Go Not Gently" in Galaxy for June 1978 (see also below). His first sf novel, Jandrax (1979), is a Planetary Romance whose inhabitants, two generations after their Starship has been stranded, have created two contrasting societies on the planet: a "stationary" order governed by the ...
Phillips, Peter
(1920-2012) UK author and journalist, whose first published story was "No Silence for Maloeween" (May 1948 Weird Tales), and who was noted for a number of stories published during the decade 1948-1957 – especially "Dreams are Sacred" (September 1948 Astounding), regarded as one of the primary texts about dream worlds and psychic Virtual Reality. A man links minds with a writer in a coma and enters ...
Zola, Émile
(1840-1902) French author whose long and intense Rougon-Macquart sequence of Naturalist novels (1871-1893) includes tales like Nana (1880; trans E A Vizetelly 1884), for which he was once notorious. Zola is of sf interest for Vérité (1903 2vols; trans E A Vizetelly as Truth 1903), the third instalment of his unfinished Les Quatre Évangiles ["The Four Evangelists"] quartet, which was planned to espouse a kind of ...
Lundgren, Ray
(? - ) American book designer, sometimes credited as a cover artist. There is little biographical information available, as Lundgren keeps a low profile and makes little effort to promote himself, but he is now working in New York City as Senior Art Director for the Penguin Group. While employed in that capacity, Lundgren has been solely responsible for the covers of a number of books officially published under the Roc/ ...
Keverne, Richard
Pseudonym of UK journalist and author Clifford James Wheeler Hosken (1882-1950), in active service during World War One, who wrote detective novels between 1926 and 1944, mostly as by Keverne, though occasionally under his own name; he was the first cousin of William Henry Martin Hosken, who wrote mostly as by Wyndham Martyn. Of some sf interest for its modest use of Scientific Romance ...
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 ...