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Monday 13 July 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 13 July 2026
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Mandeville, Colin
Pseudonym used by UK economist and author Anthony Dalston Dawson (1927- ) for his novel, The Last Days of New York (1980), in which unbalanced speculative profligacy (see Economics) sufficiently undermines New York for the city to collapse. [JC]
Sedgwick, Marcus
(1968-2022) UK illustrator and author, mostly of Young Adult fiction, most of which was fantasy, including series like his first, the Dead Day sequence beginning with The Book of Dead Days (2003), which ornately invokes (but clearly does not intend seriously to scrutinize) the tropes and topoi of Gothic SF. Some series were written for younger children, one of these – the Cudweed sequence comprising ...
Ollivant, Alfred
(1874-1927) UK author who had been a soldier; a riding accident left him crippled (badly for ten years), and – long before the outbreak of World War One – he turned to writing. He remains best-known for his first book, Owd Bob (1898; vt Bob, Son of Battle 1898), about a wise and subtle sheepdog; he is of sf interest for his last book, To-morrow: A Romance of the Future (1927), in which twenty-fourth century ...
Long, Huey
(1893-1935) US politician – Governor of Louisiana (1928-1932) and US Senator (1932-1935) – whose radical proposals for wealth distribution and other measures may have caused his assassination (though his death may have in fact been caused by his guards as they responded to a perceived threat); certainly his Utopian political philosophy, and an emphasis on strong leaders that seemed particularly threatening in the 1930s, shapes his ...
Halliday, Mags L
Working name of (apparently) Liz Halliday (1971- ), used because another author with a similar name – Liz Holliday – has also contributed work to the Doctor Who universe. Halliday's Tie, Doctor Who: History 101 (2002), in the Doctor Who: New Adventures subset, features the presence of Eric Blair (George Orwell) in the Spanish Civil War, where surreal displacements between ...
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 ...