SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 12 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.
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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 ...
Brinton, Henry
(1901-1977) UK screenwriter and author, variously engaged in social and political work, a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society; he also wrote detective novels as by Alex Fraser, and published several nonfiction books with Patrick Moore, Exploring Other Planets (1965) being of sf interest. His sf novel Purple-6 (1962) describes a very Near Future world in which the ...
Britto García, Luis
(1940- ) Venezuelan author, playwright and essayist. His fiction has been honoured twice with the Casa de Las Américas prize, for his works Rajatabla ["Strictly"] (coll 1970) and Abrapalabra [wordplay with abracadabra, can be literally translated as "Open Word"] (1980). In 2002 he was the winner of Venezuela's national prize for literature, given as a lifetime achievement award. In 2005 he received the ...
Richmond, Charles
(? - ) UK author whose sf play, A Step into Infinity (1946 chap), set half-a millennium hence, depicts the end of a vast Future War on Earth, and more cheering events on the planet Xeres. [JC]
Johnson, Annabel
(1921-2013) US author, mostly of Young Adult novels beginning in 1956, about half of them in collaboration with her husband, Edgar Johnson, who is not to be confused with Edgar Johnson (1901-1972), an earlier novelist. Of sf interest, all written with Johnson, are An Alien Music (1982); The Danger Quotient (1984), set initially in a Ruined Earth 130 years after ...
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 ...