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Monday 23 May 2022
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 23 May 2022
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Crosskey, N J
(? - ) UK professional carer and author whose first novel, Poster Boy (2019), confronts its Young Adult cast with a very Near Future Dystopian UK, distinguished from the land of the time of its publication by the mandatory insertion of electronic chips in all citizens, and other typical manifestations of a right-wing surveillance state. The young begin to revolt. Overdrawn (2019) does not much vary in its depiction of the world surrounding the tale told, ...
Sohl, Jerry
Working name of US author and former journalist Gerald Allan Sohl Sr (1913-2002), active from about 1950 in sf and other genres as Sohl and under various pseudonyms, including Nathan Butler and Sean Mei Sullivan. He began publishing sf with The 7th Order (March 1952 Galaxy; 2010 ebook) and soon released The Haploids (1952), the first of several 1950s novels whose slick surface and sharp economy of scale marked him as a professional craftsman. These books include The Transcendent Man (1953), ...
Gloag, John
(1896-1981) UK author, whose World War One experiences in the trenches – he was gassed by his own side – deeply affected his work. Though he wrote several novels, he was primarily active, from 1921, in the fields of social history, architecture and design, and his first work of sf interest was the nonfiction Artifex; Or, the Future of Craftsmanship (1926 chap), an early contribution to its publisher's To-day and To-morrow series, in which he argues that civilization might crumble ...
Bull, Emma
(1954- ) US author and editor, married to author and editor Will Shetterly; she began as an author of fantasies, her first being "Rending Dark" (in Sword and Sorceress, anth 1984, ed Marion Zimmer Bradley), and her best known perhaps being her first novel, War for the Oaks (1987): this won a Locus Award as best debut novel. Her second novel, Falcon (1989), is a remarkably well-constructed sf tale whose protagonist moves from the Planetary-Romance setting of the first half ...
Pearson, Lars
(1973- ) US writer and editor who began his career as a journalist and editor working on magazines about collectables and Comics. In 1999 he founded the Mad Norwegian Press, a Small Press which began publishing "unauthorized" reference guides to Doctor Who (1963-current) and other long-running Television series including Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) and Angel (1999-2004). At the same time the press published the Faction Paradox series of novels, based on ideas 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 ...