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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 ...
Kerr, Philip
(1956-2018) Scottish author, married to Jane Thynne (see C J Carey) until his death, who first came to notice for his Bernard Gunther sequence, the first volumes of which – beginning with March Violets (1989) – are police procedurals set in pre-World War Two Berlin, but which move into occult territory after Gunther has survived the war. Much of his later work is of direct sf interest, beginning ...
Scoggins, C E
(1888-1955) Mexican-born author, of American parents, in USA from an early age. Most of his work consists of adventure tales; of sf interest is the Colin O'Leary sequence comprising The House of Dawn (17 February-24 March 1934 Saturday Evening Post; 1935) fertile in the Amazonian hinterland, drain lake and find relics of a strange race and Lost Road (1941); in the first, O'Leary discovers an artificial lake far up the ...
Pall Mall Budget, The
UK magazine, edited by C Lewis Hind and others. Weekly, 3 October 1868 to 27 December 1894; later incorporated into The New Budget. Pall Mall Budget, nominally a weekly digest of newspaper articles from the Pall Mall Gazette, had negligible sf content until C Lewis Hind, himself a minor fantasy author, persuaded H G Wells to write a series of short stories. These appeared in 1894 under the general heading "Single Sitting Stories" and were ...
Cooney, Eleanor
(? - ) US author who may be best known for the nonfiction Death in Slow Motion (2003), about the slow decline from Alzheimer's disease of her mother, the novelist Mary Durant (1922-2008). Her fiction comprises a series of historical novels about China, some in collaboration with Daniel Altieri. Of some sf interest is their Shangri-La: The Return to the World of Lost Horizon (1996), a ...
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 ...