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Thursday 19 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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Sutphen, Van Tassel
(1861-1945) US author, who early focused on golf, as in The Golficide and Other Tales of the Fair Green (coll 1898); a later volume, The Nineteenth Hole: Being Tales of the Fair Green: Second Series (coll 1901), includes two tales of golfing sf (see Games and Sports), "The Greatest Thing in the World" being set in 1999 when the game fully dominates American life. Several of the tales assembled in The Gates of Chance (coll ...
James, Brett
(? - ) US author of Space Operas, often with Military SF elements, featuring inimical Alien civilizations which threaten to dominate reachable space. They include The Deadfall Project (2012) and the Outer Rim Chronicles beginning with Tangent (2017). [JC]
Knowles, W P
(1891-1978) UK advocate of the Knowles method of breath training and author, in active service during World War One. His Scientific Romance Jim McWhirter (1933), the last portion of which is set in 1953, advances, accompanied by considerable philosophical debate, towards a not unusual socialist Utopia where Sex is a form of hygiene, via a sequence of very ...
Breckenridge, Gerald
(1889-1964) US journalist and author (who may have been born Gerald Breitigam) of one of the more successful Radio Boys sequences, the Radio Boys novels beginning with The Radio Boys on Secret Service Duty (1922). The titles of greatest sf interest are The Radio Boys Search for the Inca's Treasure (1922), a Lost Race tale, and The Radio Boys Seek the Lost Atlantis (1923), another ...
Clagett, John
(1916-2013) US naval officer during World War Two, diplomat, teacher/professor at Middlebury College, Vermont, and author whose first sf novel, A World Unknown (1975), is of some interest for its portrayal of an Alternate-History USA dominated by a Latin civilization that has never been influenced by Christianity – Jesus Christ having never existed. In The Orange R (1978), mutants known as ...
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 ...