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Friday 12 December 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.
Site updated on 11 December 2025
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Varley, John
(1947-2025) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Picnic on Nearside" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for August 1974, and who was soon thought to be the most significant new sf writer of the late 1970s. He was fresh, he was complex, he understood the imaginative implications of transformative developments like cloning (see Clones) and Identity Transfer, many of ...
Dolinsky, Mike
Working name used by US screenwriter and author Meyer Dolinsky (1923-1984) for his sf novel, Mind One (1972), in which two psychiatrists discover that a Drug meant to treat psychosis actually engenders Telepathy, and find themselves relating warmly to each other (they are of opposite sexes); as one of them is a Jesuit priest, an element of Religion soon enriches the tale. / Active from 1947 ...
Sittenfeld, Curtis
(1975- ) American author, much of whose work chronicles the concerns and tribulations of patrician US society and its inevitable involvement in Politics. Her work crossed into the Slipstream of the sf genre with Sisterland (2013), in which twins with ESP adopt different paths in life, dependent on their respective acceptance or rejection of their inherited powers. / ...
Vigliante, Mary
Working name of Mary Vigliante Szydlowski (1946- ), who has also published sf as by Jarl Szydlow; she writes woman-centred tales whose taste for violence has struck from the first a note of ambivalence. Titles include The Ark (1978) as by Jarl Szydlow and the Aftermath Books, a Post-Holocaust sequence comprising The Colony (1979) and The Land (1979). Also as Vigliante she has published ...
Gleig, Charles
(1862-1945) UK author active until at least 1927, most frequently the author of Young Adult tales set in various departments of the navy, which (for their era) are unusually attentive to the condition of working soldiers. This solicitude is articulated in The "Bogus Surveyor"; Or, a Short History of a Peculiar People (1894 chap) as by Whitewash, the Surveyor's Friend, which details the plight of sailors in the Nautical Survey Service, and in his sf ...
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 ...