SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 24 April 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.
Site updated on 21 April 2025
Sponsor of the day: John Howard
Broderick, Damien
(1944-2025) Australian author, editor and critic; he had a PhD in the semiotics of fiction, science and sf with special reference to the work of Samuel R Delany. He edited four anthologies of Australian sf: The Zeitgeist Machine (anth 1977), Strange Attractors (anth 1985), Matilda at the Speed of Light (anth 1988) and Centaurus: The Best of Australian Science Fiction (anth ...
Benson, A C
Working name for much of his copious magazine output of Arthur Christopher Benson (1862-1925), UK essayist, poet and author, elder brother of E F Benson and Robert Hugh Benson; best known as A C Benson though often his books would give this form of his name on the cover while the full name appeared on the title page; he also wrote as Arthur C Benson and as B. Much of his short fiction was fantasy, and can be found in ...
Coulton, Jonathan
(1970- ) US singer-songwriter, whose prolific early work in 2005-2006 was particularly notable for its use of sf tropes in wistfully comic first-person songs about geek masculinity, especially in the EP Where Tradition Meets Tomorrow (2005). In "Better" the singer's girlfriend is slowly turning into a Cyborg; in "The Future Soon" a teenager fantasizes about a career as a robotically augmented ...
Ungar, Richard
(? - ) Canadian lawyer, illustrator and author, in the latter capacity initially of picture books [not listed]. He is of sf interest for the Time Snatchers sequence beginning with Time Snatchers (2012), set in distant Near Future New Beijing (that is, New York). Here Time Travel is possible, and the young protagonist finds himself working as a ...
James, Laurence
(1942-2000) UK paperbacks editor in the early 1970s and then author active under his own name and under at least nine pseudonyms and house names, including James Axler, James Barton, James Darke, Richard Haigh, William James, John M McLaglen, James McPhee, James W Marvin, Jonathan May, Christopher Molan, Klaus Netzen, Mick Norman and some further house names for non-fantastic work, including James Frazier, Neil Langholm and Andrew Quiller, all of which he shared ...
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 ...