SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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. ...
Tops in Science Fiction
US reprint magazine. Two issues, Spring 1953 (standard Pulp size) and Fall 1953 (Digest size). Published by Love Romances, New York; edited by Jack O'Sullivan (#1) and Malcolm Reiss (#2). Tops in Science Fiction featured stories which had first appeared in Planet Stories. Contributors included such Planet Stories regulars as Leigh Brackett and Ray ...
Fraser, David
(1920-2012) UK soldier who served in World War Two and became a senior general in the UK armed forces in the postwar period; in retirement, from a Conservative position, he opposed the second war with Iraq as unjustified, and "unwise, to the point of insanity". He began publishing fiction and nonfiction around 1980, his best-known fiction being the Hardrow Chronicles, contemporary military tales in several volumes beginning with Adam Hardrow (1982). Of sf interest is ...
Asimov, Isaac
(1920-1992) Russian-born US author, the original form of whose name was Isaak Iudich Azimov, but who was brought to America with his family in 1923, and became a US citizen in 1928; his second marriage, in 1973, was to fellow writer J O Jeppson (who later signed herself Janet Asimov). He discovered sf through the magazines sold in his father's candy store, though his first precocious publication, Little Brothers (Spring 1934 Boys High Recorder; ...
Musgrave, David
(1973- ) UK artist and author whose first novel, Lambda (2022), is set in an Alternate World version of London co-inhabited by humans and lambdas, the latter being extremely tiny aquatic mammals, unregistered immigrants who establish a Wainscot Society in an unexpectedly welcoming United Kingdom. Sadly, a bombing unconnected to the lambdas excites the ...
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 ...