SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 13 October 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 12 October 2026
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
Edwards, Malcolm
(1949-2026) UK editor, critic and publisher, educated at Cambridge, where he graduated in anthropology. Active in UK sf Fandom in the 1970s and early 1980s, he published the first complete text of James Blish's "The Science in Science Fiction" (May 1951-May 1952 Science Fiction Quarterly) in his Fanzine Quicksilver #2 in 1971; edited the ...
Schachner, Nat
(1895-1955) US chemist, lawyer and author, known mainly for biographies of US historical figures, who began publishing work of genre interest with "The Tower of Evil" with Arthur Leo Zagat (it was also his first publication) for Wonder Stories Quarterly, Summer 1930. His collaboration with Zagat lasted over a year, all Schachner's first eleven stories being done with him, including a novel-length tale, ...
Buckman, H H
(1858-1914) US lawyer, politician and author, remembered for the segregationist Buckman Act of 1905, in terms of which the University of Florida on its founding statutorily excluded both women and persons of colour. In his sf novel, Merope: Or, the Destruction of Atlantis (1898), Atlantis is, as the title claims, destroyed, though only after the Atlanteans have conquered Greece. It is soon learned that the protagonists are avatars of figures from ...
Duckworth, Marilyn
(1935- ) New Zealand author and poet, in UK with her family from 1939 to 1947, whose novel A Gap in the Spectrum (1959) is a tale of disorientation and perhaps Amnesia or false memory. The nineteen-year-old female protagonist awakes in London with a sense that the City and the world are unfamiliar; that she hails from another country called ...
Gevers, Nick
(1965- ) UK-born sf editor and critic, in South Africa from 1970, who has written for various journals including Interzone, Locus – where he had regular review columns 2001-2008 – The New York Review of Science Fiction and SF Site. He has been an editor for the Yorkshire-based ...
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 ...