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Saturday 19 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 ...
Bonesteel, Elizabeth
(? - ) US author whose Central Corps sequence, beginning with The Cold Between (2016), is a Space Opera series in which romance and interstellar conspiracies initially intertwine, though (perhaps encouragingly) larger scale problems confront General Corps Commander Elena Shaw. Her departure from the military (Military SF elements are modestly in evidence throughout) ...
Spindizzy
In its day, one of the best-loved items of sf Terminology. The spindizzy is the Antigravity Invention used to drive flying Cities through the Galaxy at Faster-than-Light speeds in James Blish's Okie series. This was collected as Cities in Flight (omni 1970), though Blish was using the ...
Space Opera
A popular item of Science Fiction Terminology, echoing the practice (dating from the 1920s) of referring to Westerns as "horse operas", and more immediately the term "soap operas" (from 1938) for never-ending Radio series: when Radio was the principal medium of home entertainment in the USA, daytime serials intended for housewives were often ...
L'Estrange, Henry
Pseudonym of an unidentified late-nineteenth-century UK author (? - ) whose Platonia: A Tale of Other Worlds (1893) presents its narrator with an ancient design for a Spaceship which takes him to the planet Platonista, located this side of Mars, where an oddity of the atmosphere permits telescopic perusal of our world (see Time Viewer) as it was 100 ...
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 ...