SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 ...
Whates, Ian
(1959- ) UK anthologist, publisher and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Flesh and Metal" as by I G Whates in Dream Magazine for March 1987; much of his best short fiction has been assembled as The Gift of Joy (coll 2009) and Growing Pains (coll 2013). The City of a Hundred Rows sequence, beginning with City of Dreams & Nightmare (2010), is Urban Fantasy set in ...
Phillips, Roland Ashford
(1884-1969) US author, who worked under his own name and some unidentified pseudonyms; of sf interest is Golden Isle (1925), featuring a yacht which converts into a submarine (see Inventions), and which carries its owners to a Caribbean Island at the heart of which a Lost World is discovered. [JC]
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
1. Film (1961). Windsor Productions/Twentieth Century Fox. Directed by Irwin Allen. Written by Allen and Charles Bennett. Cast includes Barbara Eden, Joan Fontaine, Peter Lorre, Walter Pidgeon and Robert Sterling. 105 minutes. Colour. / The crew of a glass-nosed nuclear submarine has a mission to fire an atomic missile into the Van Allen belts, which have been set on fire by meteors (!) and are melting the icecaps. Despite enemy submarines, a ...
Vortex Science Fiction
US Digest-size magazine, two issues, May and October 1953, published by Specific Fiction Corp, New York; edited by Chester Whitehorn. Vortex was designed to showcase a large number of very short stories in each issue, achieving this goal in #2, but the idea did not prove popular. However, not all of the nine new writers who made their debut in the second issue were doomed to remain unknown: Marion Zimmer Bradley had ...
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 ...