SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 16 February 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 9 February 2026
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Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Reitmeister, Louis Aaron
(1903-1975) US author of If Tomorrow Comes (1934), a Utopia in which an Alien from another planet, given a tour by two humans, one of whom constantly deprecates Earthly civilization; the alien in turn extols life on the planet Jedelar, whose inhabitants are unfailingly rational, needing no government to keep them in check. [JC]
Rumfitt, Alison
(? - ) UK poet and author whose T(y)ranny (coll of linked poems 2019 chap) focuses on the imagined experience of a trans woman (see Transgender SF) in a Dystopia based (critically) on Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985). Her first novel, Tell Me I'm Worthless (2021), is a ghost story. [JC]
Bixby, Jerome
(1923-1998) US author and editor; an extremely prolific story-writer; he produced not only a respectable number of sf, fantasy, horror and western stories, but also contributed large quantities of somewhat salacious stories to men's magazines of the 1960s, which have so far escaped bibliographic attention. Pseudonyms used on stories of genre interest include Jay B Drexel, Thornecliffe Herrick, D B Lewis, Harry Neal and Alger Rome, the last in collaboration with ...
Ward, Herbert D
(1861-1932) US author, most of whose short stories of sf interest were political dramas whose venues were only marginally displaced from late-nineteenth-century America, even though some of the tales assembled in A Republic Without a President, and Other Stories (coll dated 1891 but 1893) were ostensibly set a century hence. The White Crown, and Other Stories (coll 1894) continued in the same vein, though the title story itself is a ...
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 ...