SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 14 March 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 March 2026
Sponsor of the day: Paul Giamatti
GigaNotoSaurus
US monthly downloadable Online Magazine produced since November 2010, initially by Ann Leckie, St Louis, Missouri; subsequent editors were Rashida J Smith from October 2013, Elora Gatts from December 2018, and LaShawn M Wanak from August 2019. / Although it calls itself a Webzine, GigaNotoSaurus is not a magazine in the formal sense as it publishes only one story per month; but these are ...
Erisman, Fred
(1937- ) US academic and author of nonfiction work on American popular fiction, concentrating on the Western and on children's literature, though he has written on sf topics in Extrapolation and elsewhere. He is of sf interest primarily for two studies. Boys' Books, Boys' Dreams, and the Mystique of Flight (2006) (see Airplane Boys; Airship Boys) ...
Hacker, Marilyn
(1942- ) US poet, critic, editor, translator and now-retired Professor of English at the City University of New York, married to Samuel R Delany 1961-1980; the latter's Babel-17 (1966; rev 1969) includes chapter epigraphs taken from her poems. Active since 1961 – her first collection of intensely this-worldly poems, Presentation Piece (coll 1974), won a National Book Award for that year – ...
Charyn, Jerome
(1937- ) US author who was born and educated in New York, which city he gradually transformed in his fiction into a Magic-Realist venue whose mythopoeic resonances and exorbitant happenings hover (see Equipoise) at the edge of generic displacements (and beyond), and strongly prefigure the fabulated New York of writers like John Crowley, Mark ...
Burton, Lloyd
(?1935- ) South African author, who lived and worked in colonial Kenya in the 1950s and 1960s, various countries in the Middle East afterwards and since 1972 in Rhodesia; now back in South Africa. He started writing during his assignment in Kenya, but his first book, novel The Yellow Mountain (1978) was published while in Rhodesia. A typical propagandist adventure fiction in favour of the white settlers' cause in Rhodesia, it is set in Kenya, Northern Africa ...
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 ...