SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 13 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.
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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 ...
Broderick, Damien
(1944-2025) Australian author, editor and critic; he had a PhD in the semiotics of fiction, science and sf with special reference to the work of Samuel R Delany. He edited four anthologies of Australian sf: The Zeitgeist Machine (anth 1977), Strange Attractors (anth 1985), Matilda at the Speed of Light (anth 1988) and Centaurus: The Best of Australian Science Fiction (anth ...
Branley, Franklyn M
(1915-2002) US scientist and author, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, 1968-1972. Most of his approximately 200 works of nonfiction, many of them concerning Astronomy and Space Flight, were written for the Young Adult market [see highly selected list below]. His one sf novel, the Young Adult ...
Cristofari, Cécile
(? - ) French teacher and author, active from 2010 or before, who began to publish work of genre interest in English with "Memories Like Bread, Words Like Little White Stones" in Daily Science Fiction for July 2013. Much of her short fiction, some of it set in Near Future France, has been assembled as Elephants in Bloom (coll 2024); the ...
Appleby, Ken
Working name of UK author Kenneth Philip Appleby (1953- ), whose first sf novel, The Voice of Cepheus (1989), presents a clear-voiced, optimistic vision of the consequences of First Contact with an Alien species whose signals have been detected by the young female protagonist and her astronomer boss. [JC]
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 ...