SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 20 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.
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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 ...
Bazterrica, Agustina
(1974- ) Argentinian author, active from before 2015; her third novel, the Near Future Cadáver exquisito (2017; trans Sarah Moses as Tender Is the Flesh 2020), is set in a world where a Pandemic caused by a fatal virus very readily transmissible from animals to humans has generated a point of Transition, after which, all "lower" creatures having ...
Weston, Susan B
(1943- ) US author whose Children of Light (1985), set in a Ruined Earth America that had been direly but not terminally affected by Holocaust, treats the possibilities of human survival with warmth and some plausibility. [JC]
Butts, Ed
(1951- ) Canadian editor, journalist and author, much of his work being reflections on Canadian history, often for Young Adult audiences; though he began publishing work of genre interest with "A Meeting of Hunters" in Eerie Country for 1982, he is perhaps best-known over many decades for his nonfiction studies. This Game of War (2022) is of sf interest through its ...
Anderson, Poul
(1926-2001) US author born in Pennsylvania of Scandinavian parents; he lived in Denmark briefly before the outbreak of World War Two. In 1948 he gained a degree in physics from the University of Minnesota. His knowledge of Scandinavian languages and literature and his scientific literacy fed each other fruitfully through a long and successful career, during which he gained for overall achievement the SFWA Grand Master Award in 1978; he was inducted ...
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 ...