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Tuesday 15 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.
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Coulthart, John
(1962- ) UK artist, author, designer and illustrator, perhaps best known for his various collaboration with David Britton in the Lord Horror sequence, in which a savagely scatological black Alternate History of the twentieth century culminates in a World War Two dominated by Lord Horror, a grotesque Parody of the English traitor ...
Murray, James
(? - ) US author of sf interest for his Steampunk tale Frankenstein: The Illuminatus Complex (2012), in which Captain Nemo (see Jules Verne) identifies with the Frankenstein Monster (see Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; Or the New Prometheus, 1818) and searches for him ...
Neason, Rebecca
(1954-2010) US author most of whose work was fantasy; of sf interest is Star Trek, the Next Generation #27: Guises of the Mind (1993), a competent Tie to the Star Trek universe, in the Star Trek, the Next Generation series, involving planetfall on a dangerously transformed world. [JC]
Coonts, Stephen
(1946- ) US author and editor, author of the Saucer sequence, comprising Saucer (2003) and Saucer: The Conquest (2005), in which a young man discovers an ancient artefact – the eponymous spaceship – and must fight friend and foe in order to retain it in order to save humanity. Coonts's Military SF anthology, Combat (anth 2001; in three cut parts, all three together making up the ...
McDonald, Ian
(1960- ) UK author, a resident of Northern Ireland, who began publishing sf with "The Islands of the Dead" for Extro in April/May 1982, assembled, with other short work, as Empire Dreams (coll 1988); later stories were collected as Speaking in Tongues (coll 1992); he is not a prolific short story writer, though "The Djinn's Wife" (July 2006 Asimov's) won a Hugo ...
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 ...