SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 24 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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Broderick, Damien
(1944-2025) Australian author, editor and critic; he had a PhD in the semiotics of fiction, science and sf with special reference to the work of Samuel R Delany. He edited four anthologies of Australian sf: The Zeitgeist Machine (anth 1977), Strange Attractors (anth 1985), Matilda at the Speed of Light (anth 1988) and Centaurus: The Best of Australian Science Fiction (anth ...
Publishing
The history of sf publishing is, in its widest sense, the History of SF itself; this entry, however, is concerned with a much more recent phenomenon, the emergence of Genre SF as an identifiable and distinctive category of publishing, and therefore concentrates on US firms. A great amount of sf was published in the UK 1900-1950, but, although some transplanted US genre sf appeared, until about 1950 most UK firms published sf ...
Prichard, Hesketh
Working name of Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard (1876-1922), UK author, sportsman, explorer and naturalist, in active service during World War One; throughout his career, he collaborated with his mother Kate Prichard (1851-1935), the two writing as "E & H Heron" and as "K and Hesketh Prichard". They created three very popular series characters: the bandit Don Q, who featured in many adventures beginning with The Chronicles of Don Q ...
Jiang Yunsheng
(1944- ) Chinese author, translator and occasional poet on Equipoisal themes. Jiang graduated in history from Shanghai's Fudan University in 1967, and remained in an academic career, retiring as a professor of Chinese literature at the Shanghai TV University. Striking for its adult themes at a time when so much Chinese sf was Children's SF his "Wubian de Jianlian" (November 1987 ...
MacGregor, Loren J
(1950- ) US author who began publishing sf with his first novel, The Net (1987), a Galaxy-spanning sf adventure involving some unremarkable capers and a play-feud between two spacefaring merchant families. It is redeemed by the thought MacGregor gives to the implications of body-change Technology (the book reminded many readers of John Varley) and by his inventive use of the Net itself, which ...
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 ...