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Friday 18 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 ...
Zagat, Arthur Leo
(1896-1949) US author, extremely prolific in a number of Pulp-magazine genres, publishing about 500 stories, some (excruciatingly) as by Morgan Lafay; of the relatively few that are sf, several were with Nat Schachner, including Zagat's first, "The Tower of Evil" in Wonder Stories Quarterly for Summer 1930. The eleven tales produced collaboratively before they separated in 1931 were Zagat's ...
De Mar, Val
Pseudonym of Swedish-born author John W Hultberg (1872-1951), in the US from early adulthood, father of the abstract expressionist painter John Hultberg (1922-2005). He is of sf interest for Dead Men's Shoes; Or, the One Hundred Per Cent Inheritance Tax (coll of linked stories 1920), a group of stories linked by the telepsychophone, a Communications device which, as the word implies, allows various individuals to link their minds together. The ...
Sh'mantra
Australian neo-prog band. Both their debut release Cornucopia (1998) and their follow-up double-album Formula Orange (2001) are couched in an atmospheric, pared-down musical style, mostly instrumental, a little reminiscent of Radiohead. Tracks on the latter include "Robots on the Beach" and a ten-minute version of Edgar Allan Poe called "Pit and the Pendulum". It works ...
Gárcia y Robertson, R
(1949- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Flying Mountain" in Amazing for May 1987; some of his short fiction is assembled as The Moon Maid and Other Fantastic Adventures (coll 1998). Much of his work, short and long, either involves Time Travel to various eras, or is set in them; his range of protagonists is, in ethnic terms, extremely wide, and his use of characters ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...