SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 10 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 9 February 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Future Histories
The grouping of generally independent-seeming sf stories into an overarching "History of the Future" is a device most famously used by Robert A Heinlein, who caught the imagination of 1940s Fandom with a timeline featuring colourful labels like "The Crazy Years" – summarized by a sequence of mildly bizarre "1969" newspaper headlines in Methuselah's Children (July-September 1941 Astounding; rev ...
Sandes, John
(1863-1938) Irish-born journalist and author, in Australia from 1887, noted for a determinedly patriotic, Christian form of Australian nationalism; he also wrote as by Don Delaney. His first novel, Love and the Aeroplane: A Tale of Tomorrow (1910), is set in a distant Near Future Australia transformed by advances in Transportation, with monorails and other innovations. The story itself is a somewhat congested ...
Gatch, Tom Jr
Working name of Thomas Leigh Gatch (1925-1974), US West Point graduate, author, playwright and army reservist. His Alternate-History sf novel, King Julian (1954), depicts the USA as a monarchy – the Jonbar Point leading to this timeline being that when asked, George Washington did accept the crown of the Americas. In the novel's alternate present day, his descendants still rule. Gatch vanished during an ...
Taylor, Frank
(1894-1972) US author of House of the Hunter (1962), set in a deserted Post-Holocaust Los Angeles (see California), as an unseen entity gradually eliminates the last survivors in an isolated house. [JC]
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 ...