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Monday 9 February 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 February 2026
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Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Taylor, W T
(? -? ) UK author of fiction for boys, who also wrote as by John Bredon and Dave Gregory. Lord of the Incas (7 July-6 October 1934 Ranger; 1935) as by Dave Gregory is a Lost Race tale set in South America; in the Near Future The Great Disaster: A Story of 2000 A.D. (1935 chap) as by John Bredon, Britain suffers under a dictatorship and a ...
Marshall, Peyton
(1972- ) US author active since the early 2000s, her short work being exclusively nonfantastic. Her first novel, Goodhouse (2014), though its plot adheres to the dominant Near Future Young Adult Dystopia model, is written with a fluent literary intensity that lifts it from some of the constraints implied by its literal obedience to genre conventions. The young ...
Jarre, Jean Michel
(1948- ) French composer and performer of electronic synthesizer pieces. There is no explicit sf content to the instrumental suites Oxygene (1976), Equinoxe (1978) and Les Chants Magnétiques (1981) but it is hard to escape the sense that these bleepy, throbbing, soaring soundscapes are aural SF. Jarre is certainly fascinated by space. The last track of Rendez-Vous (1986), "La Derniere Rendez-Vous" is dedicated ...
Hoffman, Mike
(1958- ) US artist who has worked in Comics as penciller for both DC Comics and Marvel Comics titles, the former including Batman and Hellblazer and the latter Swamp Thing. As a creator of book cover art he is strongly associated with Jean-Marc Lofficier's and Randy ...
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 ...