SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 15 August 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 10 August 2026
Sponsor of the day: David Cowhig
Crowley, John
(1942-2026) US teacher and author who also worked in documentary films and television for some time beginning in 1966. His sf novels have had a considerable impact on the field, and his fantasies established him as a figure whose work courteously but deeply stretched the boundaries of genre literature. / His first novel, The Deep (1975), is set on a flat discworld resting on a pillar that extends beyond measurement into the circumambient galactic Deep, in which very few stars ...
Williams, Walter Jon
(1953- ) US author whose first works were nautical tales as by Jon Williams, beginning with The Privateer (1981), non of them fantastic. He began to publish sf with Ambassador of Progress (1984), an unexceptional novel (but see Women in SF) in which a female agent whose mission is to revive civilization makes contact with an abandoned, semi-feudal colony planet. Knight Moves (1985) describes the ...
Bogoraz, Vladimir Germanovitch
(1865-1936) Soviet anthropologist and linguist, who also signed himself Waldemar Bogoras and Tan-Bogoraz; a central figure in the study of the Chukchee language of Siberia, on which he published definitively. His sf novel, Zhertvy drakona (1927; trans Stephen Graham as Sons of the Mammoth 1929 US as by Waldemar Bogoras), is Prehistoric SF which reflects his professional concerns in a tale whose Neanderthal protagonists encounter ...
Gottesman, S D
Pseudonym used on magazine stories by C M Kornbluth 1940-1942: nine times solo, beginning with "King Cole of Pluto" (May 1940 Super Science Stories); six times with Frederik Pohl, beginning with "Before the Universe" (July 1940 Super Science Stories), first in the three-story Clair and Gaynor sequence; and one with both Pohl and Robert ...
Moreno-Garcia, Silvia
(1981- ) Mexican author, now in Canada, who attended university in the United States. Moreno-Garcia grew up in Baja California and Mexico City, the latter featuring prominently in her work (see also Mexico). She is perhaps the most visible Mexican genre author writing in English, and as such can be identified with the generation of young World SF authors such as Aliette ...
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 ...