SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 30 March 2023
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 29 March 2023
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Brown, Eric
(1960-2023) UK author who began publishing sf – after a children's play, Noel's Ark (1982 chap) – with "Krash-Bangg Joe and the Pineal-Zen Equation" for Interzone in Autumn 1987; like several further tales assembled in The Time-Lapsed Man and Other Stories (coll 1990), it is set in a future world dominated by the effects of bio-engineering and dense with information. This marriage of Cordwainer ...
O'Neill, Gerard K
(1927-1992) US physicist, at Princeton University from 1954 until his death, whose popular-science book The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space (1977) argues strongly for the construction of Space Habitats, either in Earth orbit or at one of the stable Lagrange Points of our Earth/Moon system – especially L5. His arguments aroused great interest among would-be space colonists, and were influential in ...
Eney, Dick
(1937-2006) US author, editor, bibliographer and fan, active in Fandom from 1949 in various capacities. He is perhaps best remembered for the substantial fannish reference work Fancyclopedia II (1959), based on and greatly expanded from Jack Speer's original Fancyclopedia (1944); a third incarnation is now online in wiki format [see under links below] and is frequently updated. Eney's other ...
Heartfield, Kate
(1977- ) Canadian journalist and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "A Pair of Ragged Claws" in Black Treacle for March/April 2013. Her first novel, Armed in Her Fashion (2018) is a fantasy set in fourteenth-century northern Europe involving revenants and Shapeshifters and strong women; an earlier novella, The Course of True Love (2016 ebook), is set in a fantasy world based ...
Hoche, Jules
(1859-1926) French author whose works seem to divide fairly equally between fiction and nonfiction. Several of his novels are sf, including Le Faiseur d'Hommes et sa Formule (1906; trans Brian Stableford as The Maker of Men and His Formula 2015), a tale clearly influence by H G Wells's The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), though the eponymous Mad Scientist ...
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 ...