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Sunday 20 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.
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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 ...
Petersilea, Carlyle
(1844-1903) US pianist and author of the Discovered Country sequence, a discursive spiritualist Utopia expounded in The Discovered Country (1889) as by Ernst von Himmel and Oceanides: A Psychical Novel (1890) also as by von Himmel, both novels being republished in 1892 as by Petersilea. The series cannot be called sf as such, but is interestingly specific about the afterlife containing no Heaven or Hell but a Platonic world whose ...
Green, Nunsowe
Pseudonym of the unidentified UK author (? - ) of the sf discussion novel, A Thousand Years Hence; Being Personal Experiences as Narrated by Nunsowe Green ... (1882) [see Checklist for full subtitle]. Though the featured tour of the future turns out to have been a dream, the novel invokes a wide range of sf notions, from ESP to Genetic Engineering to interplanetary travel to ...
Anderson, Paul W S
(1965- ) English film-maker who has worked primarily for Hollywood. Aside from his UK-made debut Shopping (1994), all his films have been action-driven sf. He has worked as a director, producer and screenwriter, with a particular specialism in Videogame adaptations, a despised form which has made him easy to dismiss, but which he often transcends with inventive exploration of the distinctive narrative forms and adrenaline ...
Berry, John D
(1950- ) American fan, author, typographer and graphic designer, longtime partner of author Eileen Gunn; he primarily works as an editor, book designer, design writer, and type consultant for software companies, including in the past Microsoft. Almost all of Berry's sf-related writings have appeared in Fanzines, although he published one short story in Jessica Amanda Salmonson's anthology ...
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. He began to publish work of genre interest with an sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" in Triquarterly for Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959]; he began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and later in ...