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Thursday 12 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.
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Mercier, Louis-Sébastien
(1740-1814) French playwright and author best known for his sixty or more plays and for his anecdotal journalism; he was active in the French Revolution, being imprisoned during the Terror. He is of interest for his exceedingly popular Proto SF tale, L'an deux mille quatre cent quarante: Rêve s'il en fût jamais (1771 Holland; trans William Hooper as Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred 1772 2vols UK; French text rev ...
Owen, Maurice
(1925-2008) Australian wholesaling company manager, resident in New Zealand for many years, and author of an sf tale for Robert Hale Limited: The White Mantle (1967), in which radical Climate Change – a new ice age – is set off by an Asteroid. [JC]
Pierre, DBC
Pseudonym of Australian author Peter Finlay (1961- ), the initials of whose pseudonym stand for Dirty But Clean, a reference to the author's adventurous but troubled early life; these early experiences are surreally unpacked in his first novel, Vernon God Little: A 21st Century Comedy in the Presence of Death (2003), a gonzo Bildungsroman which gestures at the fantastic. Conjoined twins in an almost Near Future, ...
Federman, Raymond
(1928-2009) French-born author, in the US from 1947 until his death; his family died in Auschwitz. Much of his work combines experimental forms with some content readable as fantastic; the term "surfiction" has been applied to Federman's version of the postmodern sensibility (see Postmodernism and SF). Of this work, The Twofold Vibration (1982), does incorporate a Near Future ...
Gernsback, Hugo
Working and perhaps eventually legal name of Luxembourg-born US inventor, author, editor and publisher Hugo Gernsbacher (1884-1967), who emigrated to America in 1904 to market his various minor inventions. A successful catalogue of radio parts led to a focus on publishing magazines, mostly dealing with practical science or sf, though his most popular magazine may have been the mildly scandalous Sexology. Gernsback made important contributions to the growth and development of modern sf as ...
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 ...