SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 9 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.
Site updated on 8 June 2026
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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 ...
Suzuki Izumi
(1949-1986) Japanese author who, at the beginning of her troubled career, quit her teenage job as a key-punch operator after a Fanzine story gained an honourable mention in a competition run by the literary magazine Shōsetsu Gendai. Moving to Tokyo in 1970, she moonlighted as a bar hostess, nude model and actress under the name Naomi Asaka or Naomi Senkō. Her husband, the saxophonist Kaoru Abe, died of a drug overdose in ...
Meacham, Beth
(1951- ) US author and editor, married to Tappan King from 1978. She worked first as an sf bookseller before joining Ace Books in 1981, where she developed the careers of Greg Bear, Orson Scott Card and Tim Powers, among others; she also discovered James P Blaylock and oversaw ...
Otherwise Award
The name under which the former James Tiptree Jr Award for Gender-bending or gender-exploring speculative fiction has been presented since 2020 (for work published in the previous year). Otherwise Award winners are listed below by year of publication, and also for convenience of reference in the winner list of the older Tiptree Award entry. [DRL] Winners 2019: Akwaeke Emezi, ...
Morris, Desmond
(1928-2026) UK ethologist, zoologist, surrealist painter and author who remains best known for popularizations of sociobiology, arguing in The Naked Ape: A Zoologist's Study of the Human Animal (1967) that human behaviour could be usefully studied (though not comprehensively defined) through ethological comparisons with our primate relatives. He is of some sf interest for his only novel, Inrock (1983; exp 2013), whose young protagonist enters a surreal ...
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 ...