SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 9 August 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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Moberg, Vilhelm
(1898-1973) Swedish playwright, nonfiction writer and author who published 18 novels, 38 stage or radio plays and 21 nonfiction books, four of them issued posthumously; he is most famous for his historical novels, perhaps primarily for his four-volume series The Emigrants (1949-1959; trans as The Emigrants, Unto a Good Land, The Settlers, and The Last Letter Home 1956-1959), following a group of Swedish ...
Aminoff, Iwan T
(1868-1928) Swedish noble, army officer and author. Aminoff's ancestors were Russian, but from the early seventeenth century the family lived in Finland, at that time a part of Sweden. His grandfather Johan Fredrik Aminoff (1756-1842) attained the rank of Major General and in 1808 was raised to the Swedish nobility; in 1819 he was also created a count by the Tsar, as Finland in 1809 had become the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland. Aminoff himself initially chose an ...
Itō Norio
(1942- ) Japanese translator, anthologist and critic, who first found fame aged nineteen with a review in Uchūjin of the magazine serialization of the sf novel Utsukushii Hoshi ["Beautiful Star"] (October 1962 Shinchō; 1967) that provoked the public ire of its author, Yukio Mishima. Itō then dropped out of his French Literature degree at Waseda University and contributed to ...
Stacpoole, William Henry
(1846-1914) UK lawyer and author, elder brother of H De Vere Stacpoole. In his sf novel, Herr Richter's Strange Experiment (1888), the eponymous Scientist applies his Invention – an Identity Exchange device – to the solution of a murder mystery involving identical twins. "The Teleporon" (March 1886 Longman's Magazine) ...
Benson, Gordon, Jr
(1936-1996) US bookseller, publisher and bibliographer who released the first of his many solo Bibliographies of sf figures in approximately 1980; early bibliographies such as that of Jack Williamson (?1980 chap) were privately published from Albuquerque, New Mexico, with no designated publisher imprint. In 1983 he moved into partnership with UK bibliographer Phil ...
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 ...