SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 10 July 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 7 July 2025
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Farmer, Philip José
(1918-2009) US author whose active career extended over half a century, though he was a comparatively late starter as an author, and his first story, "O'Brien and Obrenov" in Adventure for March 1946, was nonfantastic and promised little. A part-time student at Bradley University, he gained a BA in English in 1950, and two years later burst onto the sf scene with his novella The Lovers (August 1952 Startling; ...
Teitelbaum, Sheldon
(1955- ) Canadian journalist and film and sf critic, resident 1977-1985 in Israel, where he served close to five years in the infantry and as a staff officer seconded to the paratrooper corps. His sf/horror column in the Jerusalem Post was the first such outside the sf magazines; he also had a film column in the Hebrew-language magazine Fantasia 2000. From 1986 to 1996 Teitelbaum was the Los Angeles correspondent for ...
Davidson, Lionel
(1922-2009) UK author who began to publish short fiction – none of it apparently fantastic – in the 1930s, and who was best known for his intermittent but highly successful thrillers, beginning with The Night of Wenceslas (1960). In his second novel, The Rose of Tibet (1962), a young man traces his half-brother into a Lost World in the heart of 1950 Tibet, just as China prepares to invade; it is a tale full of the same ...
Zinos-Amaro, Alvaro
(1979- ) Spanish editor and author, in US after around 2003; he began to publish work of sf interest with "Problems of the Solid State" in Farrago's Wainscot for January 2009, and has since also been active as critic, with pieces appearing in New York Review of Science Fiction, Strange Horizons and elsewhere. His ...
Conroy, Robert
(1938-2014) US author of several Alternate History novels beginning with 1901 (1995), which features a German Invasion of Long Island, intimately threatening New York – but Teddy Roosevelt leads the successful resistance. In 1862 (2006), the United Kingdom allies itself with the Confederate States in the American Civil War after the North has foolishly violated ...
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 ...