SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 17 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 16 July 2025
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Williams, Tess
(1954-2025) UK-born teacher, editor and author, in Australia for many years, there receiving a degree in literature from Curtin University and an MA in creative writing from the University of Western Australia. She began publishing work of genre interest with "The Padwan Affair" in She's Fantastical (anth 1995) edited by Judith Raphael Buckrich and Lucy Sussex. Of sf interest are two novels: Map of Power (1996), set mostly in a ...
Ralph, James
(1695-1762) American-born historian, controversialist and author, in UK from 1724; his Satirical play, The Astrologer (1744 chap) – remotely based on the mistaken-doubles comedy, Albumazar (1615), by Thomas Tomkis (circa 1580-1634) – targets the tropes and lunacies of what we now call Proto SF, as conveyed through its fatuous protagonists' attempts to make sense of the vision of ...
Hartshorne, Henry
(1823-1897) US physician and author whose sf novella 1931: A Glance at the Twentieth Century (1881 chap) describes the Near Future in generally Utopian terms; America has solved its racial problems (see Race in SF), and solved other problems as well, including Pollution, through the application of high Technology. Perhaps ...
Metaphorosis
US monthly Online Magazine, first issue January 2016. Edited by B Morris Allen. Stories are published weekly online, then collected in monthly ebooks and (since July 2018) paperbacks; there are also annual collections reprinting the relevant year's tales. Each issue comprises 4-5 science fiction or fantasy stories, except for December 2017, which had 6: they are usually short stories, occasionally novelettes, rarely novellas. / Stories are, at worse, ...
Morgan, Edwin
(1920-2010) Scottish poet, active from the mid 1930s; ranked somewhere above George Mackay Brown or Edwin Muir, and just below the pre-eminent Hugh MacDiarmid, in the pantheon of twentieth-century poets in Scotland. Though much of the work of many contemporary poets can be understood as cognate or intimate with Fantastika as a whole, Morgan is unusual among ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...