SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 14 July 2025
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 14 July 2025
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Cameron, Eleanor
(1912-1996) Canadian-born US author whose career was exclusively devoted to children's literature, and who received the National Book Award in 1974 for one of her finer fantasies, The Court of the Stone Children (1973). She remains perhaps best known for the sf Mushroom Planet sequence with which she began her career: The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet (1954), Stowaway to the Mushroom Planet (1956), Mr Bass's Planetoid ...
Irwin, Robert
(1946-2024) UK academic, mediaevalist, professional juggler (briefly) and author whose work in Arabian studies, of importance in itself, underpins the world envisioned in his first and most famous novel, The Arabian Nightmare (1983; rev 1987), which may be the definitive rendering of its central conceit: a mise en abyme-like dream narrative whose protagonist, upon seeming to awaken, only finds himself passing out of one story through a Portal into a deeper dream [for ...
Tilley, Robert J
(? - ) UK jazz musician, graphic designer and author, who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Devil and Mr Wooller" in Ellory Queen's Mystery Magazine for September 1955; almost all his short work appeared by 1972, and was assembled as The Dark Corners: Fantastic Crime Stories (coll 2014) and Something Else: The Best Science Fiction Stories of Robert J Tilley (coll 2015). His stories are crisply told, ...
Landis, Marie
(1920-1999) US author who published solely in collaboration with Brian Herbert: some short fiction, but more notably two novels, Memorymakers (1991), which deals with a future Earth riven by cannibalism, and The World of Darkness: Vampire: Blood on the Sun (1997), a Tie to the Role Playing Game. [JC]
Shaw, Ali
(1982- ) UK author who remains best known for his first novel, The Girl with Glass Feet (2009), a fantasy in which elements of folklore surface through the tale of the metamorphosis of a young woman into glass; The Man Who Rained (2012) is also fantasy. Of some sf interest is The Trees (2016), set in a UK suddenly afflicted by a supernatural-seeming Disaster, a sudden countrywide irruption of ...
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 ...