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Saturday 18 July 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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Lowther, George
(1913-1975) US Radio scriptwriter, Television screenwriter, radio producer and director, and author whose The Adventures of Superman: Based on the Cartoon Character Created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (1942), an original story Tied to the newish Superman universe, which had to this point manifested mostly in Comics format, though ...
McKimmey, James, Jr
(1923-2011) US author who, after serving in World War Two, began publishing work of genre interest with "Tergiversation" in Lilith Lorraine's The Avalonian (only issue, 1952), publishing around twenty sf stories over the next fifteen years for journals including Galaxy, If and Planet Stories. Much of his work during his career, ...
Allan, Nina
(1966- ) UK author, partner of Christopher Priest from 2011 until his death (they married in 2023) in 2024. She began to publish work of genre interest with "The Beachcomber" in Dark Horizons for June 2002; of her fifty or so stories released since, about half contain sf elements, though she was first identified as an author of horror. The interwoven tales assembled as The Silver Wind: Four Stories of Time Disrupted ...
Shannon, Terence
(? - ) US author in whose What Happened to the Indians (2000) America is threatened with an Alien Invasion, these events prefigured by UFO landings in the 1940s; and responds more vigorously than the "Indians" did when the white man first came to the continent. A markedly right-wing pattern of argument (see Politics), presented ...
Quilp, Jocelyn
Pseudonym of UK author Henry James Halliwell Sutcliffe (1870-1932), who wrote regional novels about the Yorkshire Dales under his own name; Baron Verdigris: A Romance of the Reversed Direction (1894) – his first book, and his only use of the pseudonym – features a twelfth-century knight cast into confusion by being able to remember both the past and the future, but not to distinguish between them (see Time Out of 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 ...