SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 12 September 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 7 September 2026
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Chapman, Stepan
(1951-2014) US author who also wrote as Steve Chapman; he began to publish work of genre interest with "Testing ... One, Two, Three, Four" in Analog for December 1969. Some of his better early work was published – along with stories by R A Lafferty, whose deadpan disjunctiveness he shared – in the Original Anthology series Orbit, including "Troika" in ...
Parry, David MacLean
(1852-1915) US businessman and author whose anti-socialist Dystopia, The Scarlet Empire (1906), is clearly intended to counter Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888). A young socialist American thinks to commit Suicide by jumping into the sea, but awakens in a nightmarish Atlantis, a Lost World ...
Reed, Jeremy
(1951- ) UK poet and author, much of whose fiction comprises a set of loosely-linked tales about nineteenth-century decadents; those with fantasy elements include Isidore: A Novel About the Comte de Lautreamont (1991), When the Whip Comes Down: A Novel about de Sade (1992), in which de Sade Timeslips through the centuries, and Dorian (1997), about Oscar Wilde [see also ...
Mundy, Talbot
Pseudonym of UK-born author William Lancaster Gribbon (1879-1940), who emigrated to the USA in 1909 after his early life as a confidence man, ivory poacher and all-round rogue in India and British Africa had culminated in the threat – not in the event realized – of a prison sentence. He soon became a professional author, with most of his work first appearing in Adventure magazine, where he became the star writer; after 1935 he left ...
MacMillan, Armour
(1882-1939) UK author of a Timeslip tale, The Incredible Adventure (1928), uneasily Equipoisal in its depiction of the experiences of a modern banker who awakens in the Greece of 30 BCE able to speak the language; pretending he is from Atlantis, he creates considerable stir through his descriptions of various Inventions, including the motorcar. His ...
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 ...