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Friday 7 February 2025
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.
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Sarrantonio, Al
(1952-2025) US editor and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Ahead of the Joneses" in Asimov's for March 1979. Much of his work was horror, sometimes tinged with sf (see Horror in SF), including his first novel, The Worms (1985), a Gothic tale set in Massachusetts with hints of H P Lovecraft; and the Equipoisal Moonbane ...
DeFalco, Tom
(1950- ) US Comics author, editor, and intermittently (he was fired twice) a senior executive with Marvel Comics. Most of his comics work of sf interest has been with Marvel, where he scripted the {Amazing Spider-Man} in 1984-1986 and 1995-1998, the {Fantastic Four} briefly with Roger Stern in 1987 and solo 1991-1996, and others. He was editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics 1987-1994. As an author of prose he has ...
Wilson, Edwin
(1942- ) Australian teacher, painter, poet and author; of his nearly thirty books, mostly poetry collections, he is of sf interest for a novel, Wild Tamarind (1987), a very Near Future Satire set in Sydney, with Computer-driven AI's looming on the horizon, along with the Ecological self-destruction of the only recently ...
Fraser, David
(1920-2012) UK soldier who served in World War Two and became a senior general in the UK armed forces in the postwar period; in retirement, from a Conservative position, he opposed the second war with Iraq as unjustified, and "unwise, to the point of insanity". He began publishing fiction and nonfiction around 1980, his best-known fiction being the Hardrow Chronicles, contemporary military tales in several volumes beginning with Adam Hardrow (1982). Of sf interest is ...
Claudy, Carl H
(1879-1957) US journalist (for the New York Herald) and author, principally of nonfiction on Masonic themes, photography and popular science; for some years he was the Washington correspondent of Scientific American, and he served as Executive Secretary of the Masonic Service Association from 1929 until his death. His first story was "Wanted – An Explanation" (14 May 1899 Washington Post), a ghost story. He became highly active in the ...
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 ...