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Tuesday 17 June 2025
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 16 June 2025
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Monteleone, Thomas F
(1946- ) US author active in sf since 1972, first with book reviews in Amazing, then with short stories, beginning with "Wendigo's Child" for Monster Tales (anth 1973) edited by Roger Elwood. nine of them (plus a play) are collected in Dark Stars, and Other Illuminations (coll 1981). These were more ambitious than most of his work at novel length, which is undemanding adventure ...
Piller, Emanuel S
(1907-1985) US author, US editor, journalist and author, with Leonard Engel, of one of the very first Cold War Future War novels, The World Aflame: The Russian-American War of 1950 (1947), in which America's control of the air – and use of that preponderance in a nuclear first strike – proves insufficient to crush Russia, nor does a subsequent use of ...
Hinge, Mike
(1931-2003) New Zealand designer and illustrator, in US from around 1958 (his return to New Zealand in 1984 was brief), gaining considerable success for his early non-genre work, including two covers for Time Magazine (the emperor Hirohito, October 1971; President Nixon, November 1973). A "cryogenic module", commissioned by Stanley Kubrick to publicize 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), was never assembled. ...
Smith, Clint
(? - ) US technical writer and author of Infusion (2004), a tale combining aspects of Space Opera – two Consortium planets band together to send an expedition to Earth to plunder it of its "dattan", a resource needed back home – and Ecological fiction: the approaching crisis is seen through from the perspective of a galactic team whose task it is to prevent 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 ...