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Friday 20 June 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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Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
VanderMeer, Ann
(1957- ) US editor, who co-founded The Sterling Web, in 1989, continuing to edit the magazine after its name change to The Silver Web, until it ceased publication in January 2002. She also founded and edited Buzzcity Press, one of whose titles was Dradin, in Love (1996) by Jeff VanderMeer; they married in 2002. She became fiction editor of Weird Tales in 2007, and ...
Dalton, Henry Robert Samuel
(1834-1903) UK poet and author, active from 1857 to about 1890, much of whose work treated of the emancipation of women (see Feminism), and whose sf novel Lesbia Newman: A Novel (1889) depicts a profound change in UK social attitudes after the disastrous loss of Ireland and the USA in 1890, as a consequence of which the eponymous female manages to seduce the Ecumenical Council of 1900 into proclaiming the worship of women (see ...
Gove, Philip Babcock
(1902-1972) US academic, noted in later life for his editorship of the Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1961), which was heavily attacked for its "permissive" retreat from the prescriptive authority of its predecessors; less controversially, he is of sf interest for The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction: A History of its Criticism and a Guide for its Study, with an Annotated Check List of 215 Imaginary Voyages from 1700 to 1800 (1941). Though in no sense ...
Shattuck, William
(1864-1946) US author of The Keeper of the Salamander's Order: A Tale of Strange Adventure in Unknown Climes (1895), a Fantastic Voyage story whose protagonist, accompanied by demons and other creatures, visits strange lands and Islands, encountering at least one Lost Race en route. The author handles much of this material with an unsubtle Satirical brush. ...
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 ...