SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 8 October 2024
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 October 2024
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Coover, Robert
(1932-2024) US author who established a considerable reputation with his novels, in which Fabulation and political scatology mix fruitfully. His work could be seen to represent a Postmodernist intensification of the same milieu excoriated by Richard Condon; at times both authors seem to be describing a nightmare dream of orgy-choked life in the Late Roman Empire (see ...
Nicholson, Joseph Shield
(1850-1927) UK mathematician, economist and author, in Scotland from 1880, most famous for Principles of Political Economic (1893-1901 3vols), also well-known for his journalism. He is of sf interest for two novels. Thoth: A Romance (1888; exp 1889) is an impressive Lost-World novel set around 400 BCE, where a City in the North African desert, settled 2,000 years earlier, has benefited from the ...
Murphy, David
(1953- ) Irish author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Undertow" for FTL in 1989, was a founding editor of the Irish genre magazine Albedo One (a position from which he stepped down in 2013) and has assembled his stories in Broken Heroes (coll 1995 chap), Alienations: Stories of the Near Future (coll 1998 chap) and further collections listed below. His first ...
Phillips, L M
(? -? ) US author who seems to have published only two novels, one of which, The Mind Reader (1896), is of sf interest as its hero has, and exercises, the power of Telepathy during his adventures in the American West. The tale eventually moves eccentrically into occult matters, touching on Theosophy en route. [JC]
Sullivan, Tricia
(1968- ) US-born author, in UK from 1995, who has also written as by Valery Leith; married during the 1990s (dates unknown) to Todd Wiggins. She began to publish work of genre interest with "Morpheus" in Discoveries (anth 1995) edited by Alan Lothian; most of her work since that point has been in long forms. Her first novel, Lethe (1995), is partly set in the distant Near Future ...
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 ...