SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 8 August 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 3 August 2026
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MacCloud, Malcolm
(? - ) US author of two sf juveniles for Young Adult readers. The Tera Beyond (1981) is a thriller set on the planet Tera, where a student makes the Discovery, at the risk of his freedom, that microbes are inherently dual in nature, suggesting the existence of Parallel Worlds. Rather similarly, though less plausibly, A Gift of Mirrorvax ...
Schongut, Emanuel
(1936- ) American artist, sometimes credited in error as Emmanuel Schongut. He was educated at New York's Pratt Institute, where he later worked as an instructor, and has applied his skills to diverse artistic endeavours including book covers, children's books, posters, and advertisements. His genre work began in the 1960s, when he painted a number of sf book covers for Doubleday, and later for other publishers. His distinctive style, usually featuring simply drawn human ...
Hunt, Walter H
(1959- ) US computer programmer and author whose Dark Wing sequence of Military SF adventures – comprising The Dark Wing (2001), The Dark Path (2003), The Dark Ascent (2004) and The Dark Crusade (2005) – traverses an unusually long time-span from the first volume, featuring the dominating human admiral nicknamed the Black Wing who sacrifices himself to resolve the ...
Collins, Erroll
Pseudonym of UK poet and author Ellen Edith Hannah Redknap (1906-1991), who wrote under her own name The Isle of the Black Pearl (1936 chap) as E E Redknap, which verges on the fantastic. As Erroll Collins she published fiction in magazines from 1937, including several sf adventures like Mariners of Space (1944), a Space Opera describing a War between Earth, Mars and ...
Burstein, Michael A
(1970- ) US author, science teacher (with a Harvard degree and Boston University Master's in Physics) and science textbook editor who began to publish fiction of genre interest with "TeleAbsence" in Analog for July 1995, a Hugo finalist. He contributed several squibs to the same magazine's Probability Zero department (see Flash Fiction), beginning with ...
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 ...