SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 13 May 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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Suzuki Kōji
(1957-2026) Japanese author and essayist, largely known in English through the Cinema adaptations of several of his books, the international success of which obscured his wide-ranging domestic output. His horror and Equipoisal fiction proceeded in tandem with a wide array (not listed here) of books on young fatherhood and occasional works on motorcycle travel. He was also the translator of Simon Brett's ...
Hoch, Edward D
(1930-2008) US author best known for his crime novels and stories; his first story, "Village of the Dead" in Famous Detective Stories for December 1955, introduces Simon Ark, an Occult Detective [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] who claims to be a 2000-year-old Coptic priest. Some of these stories are collected in The Judges of Hades and Other Simon Ark Stories (coll 1971), ...
Williams, Liz
(1965- ) UK author who began to publish work of genre interest with "A Child of the Dead" in Interzone for September 1997, which was assembled with other early work as The Banquet of the Lords of Night and Other Stories (coll 2004); later stories were assembled as A Glass of Shadow (coll 2011). Her first novel, The Ghost Sister (2001), is set in a lost colony (see ...
Cryogenics
From a Greek root meaning "cold-producing", this word is used in Physics to mean the production of extremely low temperatures and the study of phenomena at those temperatures. The shorter word Cryonics was more commonly used in sf Terminology when – as is usual – it is people or other living organic materials that are frozen. This short version has since been adopted for real-world freezing of ...
Kelly, James Patrick
(1951- ) US author who began to publish after attending the Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop in 1974. With "Dea Ex Machina" in Galaxy for April 1975 (as by James Kelly), he began very quickly to establish himself as an author whose work contained, within a sometimes sober demeanour, considerable pyrotechnical charge. In the selfconscious 1980s controversy between ...
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 ...