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 ...
Duff, Douglas V
(1901-1978) Argentinian-born author of UK parents, in the UK from 1906. He was in active service in World War One as a naval cadet, and also served in World War Two. This extended experience, plus an inter-war career in the Palestine Police, mark him as a Young Adult writer with nothing to prove about his own manliness; it may (or may not) be consequential upon his personal experience of the ...
Glenn, Joshua
(1967- ) US editor, publisher and essayist, founder-editor of the journal Hermenaut (1992-2001), and responsible for the creation (solo or in collaboration) of several websites, including Significant Objects, Hermenaut and HiLoBrow. Through the latter site, he edited an initial iteration of the Radium Age series of reprints of sf titles – at least ten all told, most of them Scientific Romances ...
McCoy, Nathaniel P
Pseudonym of UK art publisher and author George Grandison Millar (circa 1860-1913), whose The Gold Makers (1911) is a thriller involving the Transmutation of metals. In real life Millar was a shareholder of the Scottish metallurgical company Kosmoid Ltd [see links below], established in 1904, which planned to produce mercury and perhaps gold by transmutation of lead; The Gold Makers is seemingly a roman à clef ...
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 ...
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 ...