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Saturday 21 June 2025
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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Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Whiting, Sydney
(1820/1821-1875) UK barrister, poet and author whose Memoirs of a Stomach: Written by Himself, That All Who Eat May Read (1853; rev 1853; further rev 1855) as by "The Minister of the Interior", though seemingly spoofish, articulates issues of the relationship between imperial mind and digestive body in mid-nineteenth-century terms. Of more sf interest is Heliondé; Or, Adventures in the Sun (1854; rev 1855), whose protagonist, conveniently ...
Morgan, Arthur
(? -? ) UK author whose Invention tale, The Disintegrator: A Romance of Modern Science (1891) with Charles R Brown, features a device with the power to disintegrate matter through vibrations, while instantaneously transmitting and reintegrating it elsewhere (see Matter Transmission). The plot thickens, but little happens of any interest. ...
Gansovsky, Sever
(1918-1990) Russian author, a dominant figure of the 1960s and 1970s; he was well known for his Radio plays, some of them sf, and also well regarded for his Hard-SF short stories and novellas, which were assembled in Shagi V Neizvestnoie ["Steps into the Unknown"] (coll 1963), Shest' Geniev ["Six Geniuses"] (coll 1965), Tri Shaga K Opasnosti ["Three Steps Towards Danger"] (coll 1969), ...
Fox-Davies, A C
(1871-1928) UK author, a specialist in heraldry (which he took very seriously), in whose sf novel, The Sex Triumphant (1909), the rise of women (see Feminism; Women in SF) in the Near Future is seen as disastrous. [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 ...