SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 14 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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Beckett, Bernard
(1967- ) New Zealand teacher, economist and author for Young Adult readers in whose sf novel, Genesis (2006), is set in a highly ambivalent Utopia called the Republic, founded by a businessman named Plato after World War Three in the Islands of Aotearoa, the name now given to New Zealand. The allegorical implications of the tale, ...
Buck, Doris Pitkin
(1898-1980) US English instructor and author of short fiction and poetry only, sometimes signing herself Doris P Buck and almost exclusively associated with The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Her first sf publication was "Aunt Agatha" (October 1952 F&SF); she continued to publish stories until 1975 and poems until 1981. No collection has appeared. Buck was a founding member of ...
Queen, Ellery
Pseudonym used by US cousins Frederick Dannay (1905-1982) and Manfred B Lee (1905-1971) for a lengthy sequence of crime-fiction novels and short stories featuring amateur detective Ellery Queen, beginning with The Roman Hat Mystery (1929). For many years these were characterized by rigorously logical deductions and a "Challenge to the Reader" to solve the puzzle before the final explanation. Media spinoffs included the syndicated radio show ...
Roberts, Robin
(1957- ) US academic – professor emeritus of English and gender studies at the University of Arkansas – who began to publish work of genre interest with an essay on Doris Lessing, "The Paradigm of Frankenstein: Reading Canopus in Argos in the Context of Science Fiction by Women" in Extrapolation for Spring 1995. She also contributed a number of book reviews to ...
See, Carolyn
(1934-2016) US academic, critic and author, most of whose fiction was nonfantastic and most of which, including her two sf novels, is set in Los Angeles (see California). Golden Days (1986), which shifts into the Near Future only in its closing chapters, portrays the doomed private lives of a range of characters as crises, seemingly beyond their ken, escalate into World War Three. ...
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 ...