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Wednesday 11 March 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 9 March 2026
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St John, J Allen
Working name of American artist James Allen St John (1872-1957). After a peripatetic upbringing with wealthy parents, St John settled in New York in 1891, received artistic training with the Art Students League, began painting portraits and landscapes for prominent figures in New York society, and briefly taught at the New York School of Art. In 1904 he relocated to his hometown of Chicago, wrote and illustrated one book, The Face in the Pool: A Faerie Tale (1905), and was soon ...
Cameron, Eleanor
(1912-1996) Canadian-born US author whose career was exclusively devoted to children's literature, and who received the National Book Award in 1974 for one of her finer fantasies, The Court of the Stone Children (1973). She remains perhaps best known for the sf Mushroom Planet sequence with which she began her career: The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet (1954), Stowaway to the Mushroom Planet (1956), Mr Bass's Planetoid ...
Kuroki, Poppy
(1993- ) Scottish author, in Japan 2014-2025; her first series, the Black Diamond Origin sequence beginning with Oath (2020), is fantasy [the series is not listed below]. She is of sf interest for the Ancestor Memories series beginning with Gate to Kagoshima (2024), whose protagonist is dropped by a form of Time Travel into end-of-eighteenth-century Japan, where she falls in love with a samurai. The ...
Lost Missile, The
Film (1958). William Berke Productions, Inc/United Artists. Produced by William A Berke and Leo Gordon. Directed by Lester William Berke. Written by Jerome Bixby, and John McPartland from an original story by Lester William Berke. Special effects by Jack Glass. Cast includes Robert Loggia, Ellen Parker and Phillip Pine. Narrator: Lawrence Dobkin. 70 minutes. Black and white. / An unidentified missile or missile-like object is detected in near-Earth ...
Cook, Diane
(? - ) US author whose short stories, assembled as Man v. Nature (coll 2014), manifest a twenty-first century sense that Homo sapiens's occupancy of the planet, and of our claims to pre-emptive Identity, are both fragile. The title story, set on a lifeboat in a vast expanse of ocean, follows the three survivors' attempts to make sense of the End of the World by ...
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 ...