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Thursday 21 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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Dingle, A E
(1879-1947) UK seaman and author, chiefly of sea stories, many published as by Captain Dingle. His pseudonyms include Brian Cotterell and, more prolifically, "Sinbad". It has been suggested that Fletcher's Island (1932; vt Sinister Eden 1934) as by Brian Cotterell is sf or supernatural, but it is in fact a detective novel in an exotic setting. As "Sinbad", he wrote two Lost World tales, Pirates May Fly (1943) and ...
Morris, Desmond
(1928-2026) UK ethologist, zoologist, surrealist painter and author who remains best known for popularizations of sociobiology, arguing in The Naked Ape: A Zoologist's Study of the Human Animal (1967) that human behaviour could be usefully studied (though not comprehensively defined) through ethological comparisons with our primate relatives. He is of some sf interest for his only novel, Inrock (1983; exp 2013), whose young protagonist enters a surreal ...
Coldplay
UK band formed in London in 1997 by vocalist Chris Martin (1977- ), guitarist Jonny Buckland (1977- ), bassist Guy Berryman (1978- ) and drummer Will Champion (1978- ), who have achieved huge international success with their anthemic, if not particularly adventurous, pop-rock. Their fifth album Mylo Xytolo (2011), which introduced a more bombastic, pop-based sound, is a concept album set on ...
Davidson, Avram
(1923-1993) US author and editor, born in Yonkers, New York; he served in the US Navy 1942-1945 and with the Israeli forces as a medic in the 1948-1949 Arab-Israeli War; he was married to Grania Davis from 1962 to 1964. An orthodox Jew, though his faith found direct expression very rarely in his sf stories, he began publishing work of genre interest with "The Land of Sinim" for Orthodox Jewish Life in 1948 – along with much other work – and ...
Xenobiology
The study of lifeforms that may exist elsewhere than on Earth is called xenobiology or exobiology. It is one of the few legitimate sciences to have, as yet, no direct experimental application other than the tests carried out on the surface of Mars to see if the soil showed any of the biological activity that might be associated with the presence of microscopic lifeforms. (It seemed for a time as if some of the results of this experiment might be positive; it is now thought they were caused by ...
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 ...