SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 9 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 ...
Macrostructures
An unfailingly popular theme in sf is the discovery, usually by humans, of vast enigmatic constructions – macrostructures or Big Dumb Objects – in space or on other planets. As a rule these have been built by a mysterious, now-disappeared race of Alien intellectual giants (see Forerunners) and humans can only guess at their purpose, though the very fact of being confronted by such ...
Williamson, Michael Z
(1967- ) UK-born soldier (now retired) and author, in Canada then USA from early adulthood, whose first novel, Freehold (2004), initiated the Grainne War sequence which was eventually joined by the Ripple Creek sequence beginning with Better To Beg Forgiveness ... (2007), both series and some shorter works eventually slotted into the Freehold Universe over-series. Williamson adhered subsequently in much of his work to the ...
Shedley, Ethan I
Pseudonym of Belgian-born software engineer and author Boris Beizer (1934-2018), in the US from May 1941; most of his publications [not listed below] concern computer system architecture and software testing. In his novel Earth Ship and Star Song (1979) the survivors of destructive Climate Change escape from the Ruined Earth, but while developing their Faster Than Light ...
Easton, Thomas A
(1944- ) US critic, author and biology teacher (he holds a PhD in theoretical biology) who is best known for the Reference Library book-review column he wrote for Analog from 1979 to 2008, where he covered a wide range of titles with strict fairness, though he was not often granted the room to delve deep; a selection of 250 individual reviews from the 1980s and 1990s was assembled as Periodic Stars (coll 1997). His first ...
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 ...