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Friday 4 September 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 31 August 2026
Sponsor of the day: David Cowhig
Murray, Will
Working name of US author William Patrick Murray (1953-2026), who showed an interest throughout his career in Superheroes of the Pulp tradition (on which he was a known authority) such as Doc Savage, about which figure he wrote the nonfiction Secrets of Doc Savage (1981 chap). In this context he had been literary agent for Lester Dent's estate since 1979. ...
Sullivan, Robert
(1953- ) US journalist and author, most of whose work has been nonfiction, much of it associated with Life magazine, where he served as a senior editor for many years. Of sf interest are two spoof "nonfiction" studies, both elaborately arrayed with confabulated documentary evidence about their subject matters. The first, The Flight of the Reindeer: The True Story of Santa Claus and his Christmas Mission (1996), is constructed in part around a ...
Souvestre, Émile
(1806-1854) French teacher, journalist and author whose seeming Utopia, Le Monde Tel Qu'il Sera (1846; trans Margaret Clarke as The World as It Shall Be 2004), gives a complexly Satirical portrait of the world its protagonists have attained via a lengthy period of death-like Suspended Animation, making their Sleeper-Awakes revival in ...
Adolph, José B
(1933-2008) Peruvian playwright, author and short story author who worked in multiple genres but had a sizeable science fiction output. His most respected long work of sf is the novel Mañana las ratas ["Tomorrow, the Rats"] (1984). His shorter sf is scattered among anthologies rather than published in unified collections, in part because, although Adolph acknowledged himself an sf author, he insisted in interviews that sf was merely one of the many genres in which he ...
Stewart, Ian
(1945- ) UK mathematician, currently Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick; he was elected to the Royal Society in 2001. His sf novels Wheelers (2000) and Heaven (2004), together with the nonfiction The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World (1994) and other popular-science works of sf interest, were written in collaboration with Jack Cohen – whom ...
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 ...