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Wednesday 9 July 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 7 July 2025
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Taylor, William Alexander
(1837-1912) US lawyer, editor, politician and author whose Utopia, Intermere (1901), carries its protagonist into the heart of an inland sea perhaps adjacent to Antarctica; it is clearly Atlantis. Its inhabitants, who have deliberately kept the world at bay, communicate through Telepathy; they have evolved a civilization featuring advances in science and ...
Knapp, George L
(1872-1950) US journalist and author, whose The Face of Air (1912) is set on an apparently deserted ship "haunted" by an ape whose Invisibility is the result of a chemist's misapplied Invention. [JC]
Future Science Fiction
1. Variant title of Future Fiction in its 1950s incarnation. / 2. Australian Digest-size magazine. Six numbered, undated issues running from July 1953 to March 1955 (two in 1953, three in 1954, one in 1955) published by Frew Publications, Sydney, edited anonymously by Ronald Forster. Forster was assisted in the selection of material for issue #2 by Vol Molesworth and thereafter ...
Peterkiewicz, Jerzy
(1916-2007) Polish author active as a poet in his native land from 1934 until he was forced to escape in 1940, spending World War Two in the UK, where he settled, wrote in English, and was married to Christine Brooke-Rose 1948-1975. His first novel in English, The Knotted Cord (1953), a tale dense with folklore, was published as by Jerzy Pietrkiewicz, the original spelling of his surname. The Quick and the Dead (1961) is an ...
Doten, Mark
(1978- ) US editor and author in whose first novel, The Infernal (2015), a feral child suffering burns is found in the ruins of contemporary Iraq. His American captors plug him into an interrogation device known as a Memex which is "guaranteed " to extract truth from its subjects, and he begins to speak in tongues, channelling various figures from Osama bin Laden to Mark Zuckerberg. The tale avoids any thin-concept understanding in terms of ...
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 ...