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 ...
Goebbels, Heiner
(1952- ) German musician and composer, widely recognized for his innovative radio, concert and multimedia works which frequently make use of literary sources. Schatten/Landschaft mit Argonauten (performed 1990; 1993; vt SHADOW/Landscape with Argonauts) has words from "Shadow: A Fable" (September 1835 Southern Literary Messenger) by Edgar Allan Poe, juxtaposed with a contemporary ...
Kilworth, Garry
(1941- ) UK author who began to publish sf and fantasy stories and novels in the mid-1970s, having retired after eighteen years' service as a cryptographer in the RAF; raised partly in Aden, he has travelled and worked in the Far East and the Pacific; he has also published as by Richard Argent, Garry Douglas, Kim Hunter and F K Salwood [a name used for historical novels, not listed below; nor is the Jack Crossman series of historical adventures as by G D Kilworth ...
Tuomainen, Antti
(1971- ) Finnish author (see Finland), largely in the crime mode, much of whose work contains a strong, sardonic sense of the absurdity of mapping a largely American genre onto a parochial Finnish setting, such as Palm Beach Finland (2017 trans David Hackston 2018), in which an entrepreneur turns to illegal methods to establish a seaside utopia. Unlike Reijö Mäki, with whom his work ...
Slobodkin, Louis
(1903-1975) US illustrator and author who is perhaps best known for his many picture books (none are listed here). Of sf interest is the Space Ship series beginning with The Space Ship Under the Apple Tree (1952), designed for younger readers within what would now be thought of as the Young Adult market. Young Eddie, a pleasant-tempered boy scout, meets a young Alien who disguises his ...
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 ...