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
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
Norden, Eric
(? - ) US journalist and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "The Primal Solution" in Cavalier for January 1968, in which a Jewish scientist develops mental Time Travel, inhabits the mind of Hitler and tries to get him to commit Suicide – unsuccessfully, creating instead within Hitler his hatred for Jews. Norden assembled his short work, including this story, in ...
Cărtărescu, Mircea
(1956- ) Romanian teacher, poet and author, active from around 1978. He is of some sf interest for his first novel, Visul ["The Dream"] (1989; uncensored version, vt Nostalgia 1993; trans Julian Semilian 2005), where an exorbitant use of the topoi of Fantastika are assembled (and re-assembled through the five disparate sections of the work) into a kaleidoscopic rendering of the ...
Denton, Danny
(? - ) Irish teacher, editor and author, whose first novel, The Earlie King & the Kid in Yellow (2018), set in the apocalyptically Dystopian Near Future fragments of an Ireland, half-flooded by unending rain which signals, without arguments necessary, a world dying from Climate Change. The tale is irradiated with visions of cod futuristics ...
McCoy, John
(1857-1924) US medical doctor and author of A Prophetic Romance: Mars to Earth (1896) as by The Lord Commissioner, set in a distant Near Future North America, about a century hence, which has evolved into a socialist Utopia with restrictions on executive salaries and a female president (see Women in SF). A visitor from Mars, the Lord Commissioner whose reports back ...
Greenwald, Harry J
Author (? - ) whose one sf novel for Robert Hale Limited is Chinaman's Chance (1981), a Near Future thriller in which a UK Scientist and a Chinese colleague create a new tuber plant called the Winged Bean, a source of both cheap protein with the potential to end Third World famine and combustible fuel which as a ...
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 ...