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Sunday 22 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. ...
Balle, Solvej
(1962- ) Danish publisher, editor, translator and author; her first novel Lyrefugl ["Lyrebird"] (1986), a Robinsonade whose protagonist is lost on an Island, verges on the fantastic. She is primarily of sf interest for the multi-volume Om udregning af rumfang (2020-continuing), an ongoing novel whose first two instalments – ...
Boswell, James
(1906-1971) New Zealand-born painter and illustrator, in the UK from 1925, who sometimes signed his work Bos or Buchan; he was a member of the London Group of painters intermittently from 1927, where his passionate socialism had an ongoing impact on his contemporaries. His work shows the influence of German graphic artists like Georg Grosz and the British James Fitton (1899-1982); in turn, he influenced younger artists like Ronald Searle and Paul Hogarth. A suite of eight vividly premonitory ...
Forman, James D
(1932-2009) US author whose sf novels are for a Young Adult audience. They began with Call Back Yesterday (1981) and its sequel, Doomsday Plus Twelve (1984), a studiedly and effectively admonitory presentation of nuclear Holocaust as an event having little to do – contra much of wish-fulfilment Survivalist Fiction popular in the 1980s – with post-Bomb ...
Etheridge, Rutledge
(1949-2017) US author who served in the US Navy on nuclear submarines; his first professional sale, at the age of seven, was a poem for Look magazine in 1956. He is of sf interest for two energetic adventure series: the Duelist sequence, beginning with Legend of the Duelist (1993), which is Military SF featuring bounty hunters who plan to exploit an outbreak of interstellar War; and the Agent sequence, ...
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 ...