SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
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 ...
Havel, Václav
(1936-2011) One of the most prominent intellectuals of twentieth-century Czechoslovakia (see Czech and Slovak SF); author of plays and essays, a political dissident several times arrested by the communist government (for almost five years in sum), later the last president of Czechoslovakia (1989-1992) and first president of Czech Republic (1993-2003). Havel's writing expresses a deep interest in the human Identity, especially ...
Wood, R W
(1868-1955) US author and optical physicist of some note whose sf works were written with Arthur Train (whom see for details). His comic verses and drawings in How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers: A Manual of Flornithology for Beginners (coll 1907 coll) – positing unlikely Evolutionary links based on supposed visual similarities, as between "The Bee, the Beetle and the Beet" – once had a cult following. ...
Decadence
Although the concept of "decadence", meaning the state of decay to which an institution has fallen after a long period of prosperity, can be dated to the early 1500s, the more modern sense, of an entire culture succumbing to an enervating lack of vitality (or an indulgence in sloth or sensual pleasures), began to emerge only in the nineteenth century. The belief that cultures eventually fall into a debilitating (and usually irreversible) sickness owes much to ...
Glass, Philip
(1937- ) US avant-garde classical composer; Glass has been a prolific, influential and varied maker of music since the 1960s, working in minimalist and popular idioms, utilizing both electronic and more conventional orchestral media. His most distinctive works share a focus on multiply-repeated rhythmic and melodic loops, to often incantatory though always precise and solid effect. The climax of his plotless but widely noted first opera, Einstein on the Beach ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...