SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 16 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 ...
Flatland
The two-Dimensional realm first depicted by Edwin A Abbott in Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884; rev 1884), initially as by A Square. Flatland has provoked a number of more or less didactic Sequels by Other Hands which build in various ways on Abbott's neat analogy for imagining a hypothetical fourth spatial Dimension in ...
KUUNATIC
Japanese band (the name always stylized in all capital letters) made up of keyboardist Fumie Kikuchi, drummer Yuko Araki and bassist Shoko Yoshida, all three women also serving as vocalists and performing traditional Japanese instruments. Unlike much sf- and fantasy-inspired music, KUUNATIC's unpredictable blend of psychedelia and cosmic music with traditional Japanese forms such as gagaku, sounds genuinely otherworldly. Their debut album Gate of Klüna (2021) tells of the ...
80 Days
Videogame (2014). inkle. Designed by Meg Jayanth. Platforms: iOS. / 80 Days is a text-based videogame which rewrites Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days (1873; trans 1874) as a Steampunk Adventure. The player witnesses the events of the game through the perspective of the novel's original protagonists; Jean Passepartout, ...
Kolney, Fernand
Working name of French author Fernand Pochon de Colnet (1868-1930), well known for his Malthusian approach to the problems of Overpopulation, as expressed in texts like Le Crime d'engendrer ["The Crime of Breeding"] (1909 chap). His sf novel, L'Amour dans cinq mille ans (1908; rev vt L'Amour dans 5000 ans 1928; trans Brian Stableford of rev as Love in 5000 Years ...
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 ...