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Wednesday 16 July 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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O'Neill, Joseph
(1878-1952) Irish educationist and author, active from around 1905; Permanent Secretary to the Department of Education, Irish Free State, 1923-1944. His first book, The Kingdom-Maker: A Verse Play in Five Acts (1917) as by Seósamh O'Neill, is a drama about the founding of Ireland featuring somewhat fantasticated Firbolgs. He was the author of three novels of sf interest, though Wind from the North (1934) is only marginally fantastic, its narrator passing ...
Kaufelt, David A
(1939-2014) US author best known for the nonfantastic Wyn Lewis Series, featuring a female detective on Long Island, New York. Of sf interest is Spare Parts (1978), a medical thriller set in New York in the very Near Future, where human organs and limbs are being sold to the rich. [JC]
British Fantasy Award
1. Sf Award (1966-1967), the predecessor of the BSFA Award. This short-lived award was sponsored by the British Science Fiction Association and took the form of a shield initially presented "to the person or organization which, in the voted opinion of the Association, has made the best contribution to speculative fiction in the preceding calendar year". Nominations were ...
Latner, Alexis Glynn
(1957- ) US author, librarian and creative-writing teacher who began publishing work of genre interest with "Wanderers" as Alexis G Latner in Analog for June 1990, and who is primarily known for Hard SF stories published in that magazine; in her first novel, Hurricane Moon (2007), a team of humans departs a terminally polluted Earth to find an inhabitable planet (see ...
Doescher, Ian
(1977- ) US author, based in Portland, Oregon. He is best known for a series of books, beginning with William Shakespeare's Star Wars: Verily, a New Hope (2013), which retell the stories of George Lucas's Star Wars films as plays purportedly written by Shakespeare in Elizabethan blank verse; all are subtitled "Inspired by the Work of George ...
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 ...