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Thursday 16 July 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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Nelson, Camilla

(1967- ) Australian author of Perverse Acts (1998), a Near Future story set in a Dystopian Australia beset by violent conflict between the right and the centre (see Politics). [JC]

Pseudonym of US author Charles Adams (? -? ), whose sf Satire on antebellum America, The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth; Or, the Little Quibbles of Great Governments (1856), though allegorized as a series of letters to Uncle Sam, does feature a voyage in a Balloon at such a speed that the Sun is overtaken. [JC]

Uehashi Nahoko

(1962- ) Japanese author and anthropologist, professor of ethnology at Kawamura Gakuen Women's University whose work often explores scientific knowledge in pre-modern times. In her academic work, there is a strong strand of publications that interrogate the nature of story-telling in a tribal context. Her doctoral research investigated the Yamatji, an Australian tribe that formed the subject of her sole nonfiction academic book to date, ...

Wharton, Thomas

(1963- ) Canadian teacher, poet and author, active from before 1980, his first novel Icefields (1995) being an intensely aetherealized paean to the Canadian Wilderness that edges at points into the water margins of Fantastika. His second novel, Salamander (2001), which is fantasy, initiates a career-long interrogation and absorption into the story-engendering ontological fecundity of ...

Coney, Michael G

(1932-2005) UK-born accountant, hotel manager (in the West Indies 1969-1972) and author, in Canada from 1973, serving with the British Columbia Forest Service until his retirement in 1989, an experience he described in Forest Ranger, Ahoy! (1989). He was the manager of the Jabberwock Hotel in Antigua when he published his first professional story, "Sixth Sense", for Visions of Tomorrow in 1969; several more followed rapidly. His first novel, Mirror Image ...

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 ...