SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 16 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
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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 ...
Foster, W Bert
(1869-1929) US author who specialized in the Dime Novel and several of whose Western tales were made into silent films; his sf of most interest – like "At Land's End" (May-November 1901 Argosy), a Near Future tale in which the Arctic is explored by airplane; and "When Time Slipped a Cog" (January-May 1905 All-Story), which combines ...
Spanner, E F
(1888-1953) UK naval architect who, after his retirement from the Royal Corps of Naval Construction, was the author of three Future War novels: The Broken Trident (1926), which predicts the use of torpedoes launched by warplanes against vulnerable surface vessels; The Naviators (1926); and The Harbour of Death (1927), where future war battles take place in the Mediterranean. Spanner's recurring message is that the UK ...
Markson, David
(1927-2010) US author of the stringently Modernist Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988), whose protagonist may be the last human (see Last Man) left on Earth; the novel is couched as an array of assertive, gnomic paragraphs in the style of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), and similarly dramatizes the gap (or perhaps aporia) between the world and the propositions ...
Stevens, Jessi Jezewska
(1990- ) US author, resident in Geneva, Switzerland; most of her work, including several stories published since around 2010, is nonfantastic; her first novel, The Exhibition of Perephone Q (2020), approaches the fantastic in its examination of life in New York in terms of Identity theft. Her second novel, The Visitors (2022), Equipoisally assesses the ...
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 ...