SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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.
Site updated on 16 February 2026
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
Silver, Eve
(? - ) Canadian author who began to publish work of genre interest with Driven (2007) as by Eve Kenin, a Young Adult adventure/romance set in a future Dystopia with the flavour of an Arctic Mad Max (1979). This opens her Northern Waste sequence, which continues with Hidden (2008) and Frozen (2016), both also as ...
Friedell, Egon
(1878-1938) Austrian cabaret artist, wit, polymath, translator and author, born Egon Friedmann (he changed his name to Friedell in 1916), rejected for military service in World War One through physical disabilities; he also wrote as by Egon Friedländer. He remains best known for his seminal Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit: die Krisis der europäischen Seele von der Schwarzen Pest bis zum Weltkrieg (1927-1931 ...
Massively Multiplayer Online Game
Term used to describe a type of Videogame in which large numbers of players interact with each other in a persistent Online World. Various forms exist, including Space Sims, exemplified by EVE Online (2003), and First Person Shooters, such as the science-fictional PlanetSide (2003 Verant Interactive, Win) ...
Roberts, Tansy Rayner
(1978- ) Australian fan (see Fandom) and Fanzine writer, and author, winning Hugo awards in 2013 and 2015 for her fan accomplishments; her fiction is almost exclusively fantasy [not listed below]. Of sf interest is the Young Adult Musketeer Space (2017), a Space Opera specifically ...
Envoy Extraordinary, An
Pseudonym of the unidentified author (? -? ) of King Squash of Toadyland (1890), a Satirical portrait of Britain during the course of which party politics are eliminated and the King deposed, creating something like a Utopia. Any presumption that the tale is set in the Near Future because it is not Queen Victoria who loses the throne perhaps insists too strongly ...
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 ...