SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 25 September 2023
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 18 September 2023
Sponsor of the day: Terrence Somerville
Albano, Peter
(1922-2006) US author who served in the US Navy 1942-1946; he is known mainly for the nine-book Seventh Carrier sequence of Military SF adventures starring the World War Two Japanese aircraft carrier Yonaga, trapped for over forty years in a secret port by a shift of glacier ice. The crew and airmen, now mostly in their sixties, finally break free in late 1983. Owing to a rogue Chinese anti-missile system whose ...
Rosa, Samuel Albert
(1866-1940) Australian journalist, politician and author, mostly in the US and UK before 1888, whose Near Future sf novel, The Coming Terror; Or, the Australian Revolution (1894 chap; vt Oliver Spence, the Australian Caesar: Or, the Coming Terror 1895 chap), expresses a fin de siècle sense of the fragility of White civilization; The Invasion of Australia (1920), a nonfiction description of Australia's ...
Wells, Robert Gilbert
(?1865-? ) US teacher and author, mostly resident in Iowa, where he published Anthropology Applied to the American White Man and Negro (1905), which despite its title is a fictional Satire on race relations in post-Reconstruction America (see Race in SF) with numerous sf and fantastic elements, including Invisibility, Time Travel and a ...
Stoddard, William O
(1835-1925) US editor, government official, inventor and author, Abraham Lincoln's Assistant Private Secretary 1861-1864, resigning for health reasons which also truncated his slightly later career as a United States Marshall in Arkansas. His patents were in the field of publishing. He began to publish fiction in 1869, producing in the end more than 100 volumes, mostly for young readers. Those of sf interest include two Lost Race novels: ...
Hervey, Michael
(1915-1979) UK author who moved to Australia in 1951; born Mark Hockman but known as Mark Hoffman until he changed his name by deed poll to Michael Hervey in 1942. He is the author of an estimated 3500 short stories in various genres. His sf work is minor; it includes a Utopia, Strange Hunger (1946), in which the Federated States must defend themselves against evil Slavonia, and The Silver Death (?1945 chap), about a German ...
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 ...