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Friday 12 June 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 8 June 2026
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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Kreighbaum, Mark
(? - ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Field of Honor" for Midnight Zoo vol 2 #3 in 1992; in his Planetary Romance sequence The Pinch – comprising Palace: A Novel of the Pinch (1996) with Katharine Kerr and The Eyes of God: A Novel of the Pinch (1998) – the planet known as Palace is the focus of ...
Galton, Francis
(1822-1911) UK geneticist, eugenicist and author, grandson of Erasmus Darwin, and a speculative thinker from his early years: The Telotype; a Printing Electric Telegraph (1849 chap [dated 1850]) describes the use of typewriters (not yet invented) to convey messages electrically over long distances. He is of course most important in sf terms for coining the word Eugenics, which he defined as "the science of improving ...
Bowman, W E
(1911-1985) UK draughtsman, civil engineer and author whose best-known work is The Ascent of Rum Doodle (1956), a Parody of British mountaineering expedition reports which quickly gained a cult following. An utterly inept team led by the pompous, Pooteresque "Binder" (his codename in walkie-talkie communications), and including an easily distracted Scientist, ascends or rather fails to ascend the titular mountain. The ...
Gibbs, Anthony
(1902-1975) UK author of a very Near Future sf novel, The New Crusade (1931), in which society is transformed by a millionaire so that nudism may triumph. [JC]
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 ...