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Wednesday 18 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.
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Harding, Ellison
(1883-1952) US businessman and author whose The Demetrian (1907; vt The Woman Who Vowed 1908) is a Utopia set about two years in the future. [JC]
Sidewise Award
These annual awards for Alternate History fiction were conceived in 1995 by Evelyn C Leeper, Robert B Schmunk and Steven H Silver, and have since been presented annually in two categories, Long Form for works of more than 60,000 words and Short Form for works (including poems) of less than 60,000 words. The awards' name is a homage to Murray Leinster's short ...
Bailey, Hilary
(1936-2017) UK editor and author, married to Michael Moorcock 1962-1978, who during the earlier part of her career wrote about 15 sf and fantasy stories, including "The Fall of Frenchy Steiner" (July/August 1964 New Worlds), a Hitler Wins tale whose Jonbar Point is the German decision – based on Steiner's prescience – not to invade Russia in 1941, ...
Willis, Meredith Sue
(1946- ) US author active since the early 1990s, much of her work being nonfiction about the art of writing. Of some sf interest is the Young Adult tale The City Built of Starships (2005), whose young Ecologically-sound protagonist confronts old-guard remnants of the expedition which has attempted to colonize (see Colonization of Other Worlds) the ...
du Maurier, Daphne
(1907-1989) UK author, granddaughter of George du Maurier, famous (against her will: she thought of herself as an author of psychological studies without genre taint) for "romances" so darkly demanding that the psychic abysses they portray have reminded readers of the work of Franz Kafka. Her first publications, tales written and mostly published from around 1927 to 1930, were assembled in Early Stories (coll ...
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 ...