SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 7 November 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 2 November 2026
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
Hayward, William Stephens
(1835-1870) UK author, responsible for many adventure novels published in book form between 1863 and 1886, whose sf novel, The Cloud King, or Up in the Air and Down in the Sea (February-August 1863 The Boys' Journal as "The Cloud King; or, The Adventures of Charley Skyflier"; 1865), features a Balloon trip to an African Lost World in which low Gravity seems to help keep the natives ...
Jackson, Edward Payson
(1839-1905) Turkish-born US educator and author, of missionary parents, in America from 1845; of sf interest is A Demigod: A Novel (1886), published anonymously, in which a Eugenics programme, begun in Greece in the seventeenth century, generates in the late nineteenth century a Superman who boasts extraordinary strength and agility, plus a massive intellect, out of which pours Inventions ...
Flint, Eric
(1947-2022) US author with a master's degree in history from UCLA, who spent many years before beginning his writing career as a longshoreman and then machinist, as well as serving as a labour organizer and member of the US Socialist Workers Party. His first work of genre interest was "Entropy, and the Strangler" (in L Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume IX, anth 1993, ed Dave Wolverton), though he began publishing regularly only ...
Reintgen, Scott
(? - ) US author of stories for younger children and of Young Adult sf and fantasy fiction series. The first of these, the Nyxia Triad sequence beginning with Nyxia (2017), traces the consequences for a group of teenagers who have been recruited by an interstellar corporation ominously called Babel to journey for a year on a Space-Operatic ...
Golem
The Jewish legend of the Golem comprises a set of Proto-SF stories about the maker and the made. Several well-known rabbis and Judaic scholars of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance had Golem stories ascribed to them, the most elaborate cycle being that connected with Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel (1512-1609), the Maharal of Prague, a controversial and admired sage and community leader. "His" version of the Golem, Joseph, is an ...
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 ...