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Thursday 10 September 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.
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Cole, Allan
(1943-2019) US Television scriptwriter – with more than 100 credits to his name – journalist and author; his sf screenwriting includes three episodes of the series The Incredible Hulk (1977-1982), two of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979-1981) and six of Defenders of the Earth ...
Schram, Irene
(1941- ) US poet and author, her active publishing career extending from 1966 to 1974. Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down (1972) is a Fabulation in which hints of a possible Holocaust – a sudden massive fall of incinerator ash in an unnamed city identical to New York – are transubstantiated into fable as a group of ten-year old children, escaping what their ...
Meynell, Esther
(1878-1955) UK author whose Grave Fairytale (1934) frames the tale of a frustrated musician with references to folklore, and Time's Door (1935), a Timeslip tale in which an Italian violinist travels by Timeslip to the eighteenth century, where he becomes involved with Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750). Meynell was the niece by marriage of the poet and suffragette Alice Meynell (1847-1922). [JC]
Jetta
US Comic (1952-1953). Three issues (numbered #5-#7). Standard Magazines, Inc. Artists Dan DeCarlo, Fred Eng and Joe Edwards; scripts by Joe Archibald and Dixon Wells. Each issue had five strips (though one was only a page or two) and one two-page text story. / With the popularity of Archie Comics – about the life of normal American teenager Archie Andrews and his friends in the town of Riverdale – it is not surprising that other comics appeared ...
Yourell, Agnes Bond
(1864-? ) US author whose A Manless World (1891) speculates about what might happen to the human species were an interstellar gas to have destroyed "animal desire" (see Sex; Feminism) in everyone except – it is mooted – the Jews (see Race in SF), who might find an elixir: riots and pogroms would occur; the race would vanish. In a manner not uncommon to ...
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 ...