SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 21 December 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 15 December 2025
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Varley, John
(1947-2025) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Picnic on Nearside" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for August 1974, and who was soon thought to be the most significant new sf writer of the late 1970s. He was fresh, he was complex, he understood the imaginative implications of transformative developments like cloning (see Clones) and Identity Transfer, many of ...
Pathologic
Videogame (2006; vt Pestilence: The Utopia in Russia). Ice-Pick Lodge. Designed by Nikolay Dybowskiy. Platforms: Win. / While Pathologic's gameplay resembles that seen in examples of the Survival Horror form, it is perhaps better described as a slow-paced action Adventure, viewed from a first person perspective. The majority of the player's time is spent exploring the game's ...
Perkins, Penny
(1962- ) US author of Bob Bridges: An Apocalyptic Fable (1999), scattily Equipoisal between sf and Beast Fable [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below], whose Computer programmer eponym has been predicting nuclear Holocaust, a vision confirmed by a cockroach from the ...
Goodwin, John C
(1891-1951) UK author, after active service during World War One, of several popular books on crime and criminals, and of The Rainbox (1935), an Invention tale about a rain-making device. [JC]
Reed, Douglas
(1895-1976) UK author, in active service as a fighter pilot in World War One, in South Africa from 1947. He was initially best known for such controversial political/cultural studies as Insanity Fair (1938); the essays on World War Two assembled in All Our Tomorrows (coll 1942) culminate in a vision of Hermann Goering in 1979. In his sf novel, The Next Horizon (1945; vt ...
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 ...