SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 15 June 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 15 June 2026
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Yolen, Jane
(1939-2026) US author, partially resident in Scotland, who began publishing poems and articles when still in college, and who first came to notice with books for children, the first of many being Pirates in Petticoats (1963). Of her circa 460 titles, many of which won awards in her field, most were for children (see listing below for some of these), many of them being picture books for younger children; most of her adult fiction, of which she wrote relatively little, was ...
Murray, Terry A
(1953-2025) US collector and bibliographer whose magnum opus was the Science Fiction Magazine Story Index, 1926-1995 (1999), indexing more than 30,000 genre stories. He and his elder brother Edwin L Murray accumulated a very substantial collection of sf, fantasy, Comics, Fanzines, Board Games and Role Playing Games which they donated between 2002 and 2019 ...
Perry, Walter Copland
(1814-1911) UK author, lawyer and archaeologist in whose sf novel, The Revolt of the Horses (1898), the Houyhnhnms from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726; rev 1735) arrive in the Near Future England of 1950. Finding humans as terrible as ever – a Future War features in the tale – they decide to destroy the race. [JC]
Tabler, Joseph
(1949- ) US abody surfer, bookseller and author, based for all his activities in California; he ran the well-known Joseph Tabler Books in San Diego 1989-1999. Of his thrillers, three have some sf interest: Capitol Hill Clones (1981), a political Satire involving a scatty use of Clones; The Microwave Caper (1981), in which a mysterious ...
Kurtz, Katherine
(1944- ) US author employed in various fields including oceanography and cancer research, as well as a stint as instructional designer for the Los Angeles Police Department. Her fiction, basically Fantasy, though with a sensation of underlying premises arguable in sf terms, has been dominated from the beginning by the unfolding Chronicles of the Deryni sequences, all set in a highly detailed, coherent ...
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 ...