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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
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 ...
Thorpe, Fred
Pseudonym of Frank Albert Stearns (1854-1899), US dime novelist and author under his own name of two popular children's books based on the Arabian Nights, Chris and the Wonderful Lamp (1895) and Sindbad, Smith and Co (1896); he was the father of Edgar Franklin Stearns, who wrote as Edgar Franklin. As Thorpe he wrote many kinds of dime novel (see Dime-Novel SF), but was best known for marvel ...
Saville, Guy
(1973- ) UK author whose Hitler Wins series, the Burton Cole sequence comprising to date The Afrika Reich (2011) and The Madagaskar Plan (2015), focuses on the Nazi conquest of Africa, and the deportation of all European Jews to Madagascar. The total defeat of the United Kingdom at Dunkirk provides the Jonbar Point for the extended tale; in the early 1950s, a triumphant ...
Supersonic Saucer
Film (1956). Gaumont British Picture Corporation/British Lion Film Corporation. Directed by Guy Fergusson. Written by Dallas Bower from a story by Frank Wells. Cast includes Fella Edmonds, Gillian Harrison, Tony Lyons and Marcia Monolescue. 50 minutes. Black and white. / A small, friendly Alien from Venus is found and "adopted" by a group of schoolchildren from an English countryside school. The alien is pursued by criminals who ...
Brown, Timothy
(1961- ) US author whose first novel Polaris (2014) is a Near Future tale set in Death Valley (see California), an extreme environment which instantly evokes a sense that Climate Change may have deepened sufficiently to have created Ruined Earth conditions, and that the elderly protagonist of the tale, alone with a ...
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 ...