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Friday 10 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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Speight, T W
(1830-1915) UK railway company executive and author; of his many novels and tales, The Strange Experiences of Mr Verschoyle: Told by Himself and Edited by T W Speight (1901) is of sf interest as a tale of Identity Transfer, a technique utilized by a venomous young man to revenge himself on the family that had thwarted his marital ambitions. The Grey Monk (1895) is a ghost story. [JC]
McCardell, Roy L
(1870-?1961) US screenwriter and author, whose extremely early Tie, The Diamond from the Sky: A Romantic Novel (coll of linked stories 1916), puts in book form his own filmscript about an Asteroid with a great diamond at its heart which plummets into seventeenth-century western America. McCardell also appeared as himself in the live-action prologue to Winsor McCay's pioneering animated film, ...
Silbersack, John
(1954- ) US editor, agent and author, active as an editor with Putnam/Berkley books 1977-1981, with New American Library 1986-1992, with Warner Books in 1992, and with Harper Collins 1993-1999; he joined Trident Media Group in 2001 as a senior agent. Throughout his career he has been noted for a swift and canny knowledgeability about the sf world. With Victoria Schochet he edited the first four ...
Richter, Eugen
(1838-1906) German politician and author, who opposed nineteenth century German antisemitism with vigour and eloquence, and as a liberal opposed the government of Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898). Of sf interest is Sozialdemokratische Zukunftsbilder: frei nach Bebel (1891; trans Henry Wright as Pictures of the Socialistic Future (Freely Adapted from Bebel);vt ...
Burgess, Tony
(1959- ) Canadian performance artist (under the name Tony Blue) and author in whose first novel of sf interest, Pontypool Changes Everything (1998), a Meme-spread Basilisk destroys victims' ability to make sense through language: then they go mad. It was filmed as Pontypool (2008), and assembled with the more conspicuously surreal ...
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 ...