SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 10 May 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 4 May 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Conway, Gerard F
(1952-2026) US author informally known as Gerry Conway who began his career in Comics, writing some non-fantastic scripts for Marvel Comics, and editing the short-lived 1973 weird fiction magazine The Haunt of Horror and writing for the 1973-1975 anthology Comic Worlds Unknown. He also worked extensively for ...
Solar Opposites
US animated online tv series (2020). 20th Television Animation. Created by Mike McMahan and Justin Roiland. Executive producers: Josh Bycel, Mike McMahan and Justin Roiland. Directed by Kim Arndt, Lucas Gray, Bob Suarez and Andy Thom. Writers include Mike McMahan and Justin Roiland. Voice cast includes Sean Giambrone, Mary Mack, Sagan McMahan, Thomas Middleditch and Justin Roiland. Eight 24-minute episodes. Colour. / "Planet Shlorp was the perfect Utopia ...
Lane, Jane
Pseudonym of UK author Elaine Kidner Dakers (1905-1978), author under her own name of a biography, Titus Oates (1949), and author of many esteemed historical novels under as by Lane. Her Post-Holocaust sf novel, A State of Mind (1964), is set in an Orwell-like totalitarian Dystopia, an England where both god and monarchy have been banned. [JC]
Garfield, Richard
(1963- ) US Game designer with a PhD in combinatorial mathematics, inducted into the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design Hall of Fame in 1998. Garfield is perhaps the epitome of game designer as celebrity mathematician. He is famous primarily for having invented the modern Collectible Card Game in 1993 with the release of his first published game, Magic: The Gathering (see ...
Pears, Iain
(1955- ) UK art historian and author, perhaps best known for his Jonathan Argyll series of nonfantastic detective novels featuring an art historian [not listed below]. His most influential singleton, An Instance of the Fingerpost (1997), scrutinizes the same seventeenth-century intellectual revolution focused on by Neal Stephenson in his Baroque Trilogy: the metaphysics and politics attending the shift from ...
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 ...