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 ...
Freese, Stanley
(1902-1972) UK author, best known for various works on English water mills and windmills; The Ten-Year Plan: A Dream of 1940 (1932) is a Utopia espousing traditional country values against the darkening tide of industrialization. It proposes that the presumed Overpopulation crisis of London should be solved by dispersal to a new town or towns with efficiently planned ...
Cartier, Edd
Working name of US illustrator Edward Daniel Cartier (1914-2008). After graduating in 1936 from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, Cartier was hired by Street & Smith to work on their Pulp magazines, notably The Shadow (see The Shadow). His skills were noticed by John W Campbell Jr, who began using him in the new magazine ...
Munsey, Frank A
(1854-1925) US newspaper and magazine publisher and author. He began publishing in 1882 with The Golden Argosy, a weekly Boys' Paper, later transformed into The Argosy. Munsey expanded his titles to include Munsey's Magazine, The Scrap Book, The All-Story, Cavalier ...
Silkpunk
Item of sf Terminology coined by Ken Liu to describe the aesthetic in his Dandelion Dynasty series, comprising of The Grace of Kings (2015), The Wall of Storms (2016), The Veiled Throne (2021) and Speaking Bones (2022). Silkpunk works blend organic, handcrafted Technologies with speculative engineering, diverging from the industrialized ...
Nicholls, Peter
(1939-2018) Australian editor and author, primarily a critic and historian of sf through his creation and editing of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction [see below]; resident in the UK 1970-1988, in Australia from 1988; worked as an academic in English literature (1962-1968, 1971-1977), scripted television documentaries, was a Harkness Fellow in Film-making (1968-1970) in the USA, worked as a publisher's editor (1982-1983), often broadcast film and book reviews on BBC Radio from 1974 and ...