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Wednesday 11 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.
Site updated on 9 March 2026
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Landsberger, Artur
(1876-1933) German author, active and prolific from around 1900 until Nazi persecution – he was Jewish – led to his Suicide; he sometimes gave his first name as Arthur. He is of sf interest for his Near Future Satire Berlin ohne Juden ["Berlin Without Jews"] (1925), which is explicitly based on Hugo Bettauer's ...
Crofton, Francis Blake
(1842-1911) Irish-born librarian and author, in Canada from 1864 (with a decade in the US) until his retirement as librarian of the Nova Scotia provincial legislature 1in 1906 and his subsequent move to England. His nonfiction work in bibliography is of some importance; of his fiction, he is of moderate sf interest for two volumes of Tall Tales [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. The Major's Big-Talk Stories ...
Kellogg, Vernon
(1867-1937) US entomologist, biologist and author; initially a pacifist in World War One, he recorded that his shock at the brutal implications of the Social Darwinism promulgated by senior German officers he met forced a change of mind, as he recorded in Headquarters Nights [for subtitle see Checklist below] (1917) (see also Eugenics). These encounters may have inspired ...
Bell, Derrick
(1930-2011) US lawyer, academic and author, a central figure in the creation of what became known as "critical race theory", the argument that racism – which as a Black lawyer he had been involved in combating – was so inherent in American society that apparent reductions in segregation and discrimination would be cosmetic. The basic institutional racism of America, he argued, would inevitably reassert itself to the advantage of the already advantaged. / Though he wrote ...
Dowding, Henry Wallace
(1867-1938) UK-born clergyman and author, in the US from 1889, most active in the 1920s. His sf novel, The Man from Mars, or Service, for Service's Sake (1910), is occupied for much of its length with its protagonist's search for a McGuffin document, but shifts in its later moments to be a long description, on the part of the protagonist's employer, of his time on Mars, which planet is small, quite close to Earth, and ...
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 ...