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Saturday 11 April 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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Robbins, David
(1950- ) US author, prolific in several genres under various names, his first novel, The Wereling (1983), being horror; perhaps best known for the nonfantastic Wilderness sequence of Westerns as by David Thompson. He is of greatest sf interest for the Endworld Post-Holocaust Survivalist sequence, which begins with ...
Timmons, Stan
(1966- ) US author, chiefly of Ties, who began to publish work of genre interest with "Life Is But a Dream" in the Marvel Universe Superhero anthology The Ultimate X-Men (anth 1996) edited by Stan Lee. His first novel was the Heavy Metal-related Heavy Metal F.A.K.K.2. (1999) with Kevin Eastman. A solo venture is ...
Fichman, Frederick
(? - ) US author whose SETI (1990) pits its teenaged hero against both US and Soviet governments – whose representatives are envious of his freelance initiatives – in the race to make First Contact (see also SETI). The teenager does very well. The SETI sequence is continued in self-published sequels: see Checklist below. [JC] see also: ...
Benson, Robert Hugh
(1871-1914) UK author; third son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Edward White Benson (1829-1896), and brother of the fantasy and horror authors A C Benson and E F Benson, the latter remaining by far the best-known of the three. Benson was ordained as a priest in the Church of England in 1895 but converted to Catholicism in 1902 and was ordained as a priest in 1904. His fiction, unsurprisingly, is composed with a convert's intensity, ...
BattleTech
Cardboard models-based Wargame (1984). FASA. Designed by Jordan Weisman. / One of the most commercially successful wargaming franchises ever created, BattleTech transplanted the human-piloted giant Mecha robots of Japanese Anime to a gritty far future setting of constant war. The original game is set during the thirty-first century, when hundreds of years of conflict have reduced an interstellar ...
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 ...