SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 10 June 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 8 June 2026
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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Diplomat, A
Pseudonym of the unidentified US author (? -? ) of The Rise and Fall of the United States: A Leaf from History, A D 2060 (1898), a Future History describing the Near Future fall of America after the working classes have conducted an ill-advised rebellion against the wealthy. [JC]
Garbo, Norman
(1919-2017) US painter and author, active in the former capacity from around 1940, whose Near Future novel, The Movement (1969), grimly extrapolates late-1960s-style confrontations between US students and police into the takeover of a vast university campus and retaliatory bombing by the government. The coherence of the student movement is exaggerated, but the Computer- and bureaucracy-dominated world they hope to ...
Mineo, Attilio
(1918-2010) US jazz and pop musician, composer and arranger who also worked as Art Mineo. In 1962 he created an album for the Seattle World's Fair, Attilio Mineo Conducts Man in Space: Modern Harmonic Supersonic Sounds (1962), intended to take the visitor on a sonic journey through a future of monorails, Rockets and Space Flight. Mixing lush orchestral arrangements with then futuristic-sounding electronics and sound ...
St John, D W
(1956- ) US editor and author whose sf novel, Sisters of Glass (1999), set in Near Future Los Angeles (see California), explores Genetic Engineering through a thriller plot. The protagonist of the tale, a Telepath ex-cop, is tasked to track down a genetically engineered woman who is essentially owned, because of the patented ...
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 ...