SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 13 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.
Site updated on 13 July 2026
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LeBlanc, Maurice
(1864-1941) French author in various genres, though after he began the Arsène Lupin sequence, with "L'Arrestation d'Arsène Lupin" ["The Arrest of Arsène Lupin"] (15 July 1905 Je Sais Tout), he focused most of his energies on his raffish, inexplicably elusive gentleman thief and frustrator of "Herlock Sholmes" or "Holmlock Shears" (these and other names were used in attempts to placate Arthur Conan Doyle). In later ...
Green, Ian
(? - ) Scottish author, mostly of fantasy, including the Rotstorm sequence beginning with The Gauntlet and the Fist Beneath (2021), set in a land whose violence – and large variety of agenda-bound creatures of various sorts – contrasts with some effectiveness to the central narrative line, in which a bereaved mother searches for her lost daughter. The spread of the rotstorm that gives the series its name is combatted by ...
Taber, Deb
(? - ) US editor and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "How to Raise a Human" in Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest for Fall 2006, which evokes Horror in SF. Her first novel, Necessary Ill (2013), depicts a morally ambiguous Near Future America where problems of Overpopulation and the exhaustion of planetary ...
Aubrey, Frank
The first and main pseudonym of UK civil engineer and author Francis Henry Atkins (1847-1927), who contributed widely to the pre-sf Pulp magazines, writing at least three Lost-World novels along with much else. The first and most successful of the three was The Devil Tree of El Dorado: A Romance of British Guiana (1896), which capitalized on the contemporary interest in the Roraima Plateau lying athwart the disputed border ...
Fear
1. Fear! US Digest-size magazine. Publisher: Great American Publications, Incorporated. Editor: Joseph L Marx. Two bimonthly issues, May and July 1960. / This short-lived attempt to revive the Weird Tales style of magazine was competent enough, but launched at a poor time for US fiction magazines in general, when readership across the board was evaporating. Some notable authors appeared, including John ...
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 ...