SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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
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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 ...
Smith, Ben
(? - ) UK author whose first novel, Doggerland (2019) takes its title from the landmass that connected the UK to Europe before around 6000 BCE, and which is permeated throughout by a chthonic saudade about a world Under the Sea that remains somehow whole (though unobtainable): the sea, in the Near Future world of Doggerland's main narrative, has suffered irretrievable ...
Sociology
Sociology is the systematic study of society and social relationships. The word was coined by Auguste Comte (1798-1857) in the mid-nineteenth century, and it was then that the first attempts were made to divorce studies of society employing the scientific method, on the one hand, from dogmatic political and ethical presuppositions, on the other. Social studies in a more general sense have, of course, a much longer history, going back to Plato. Sociology and sf have a ...
Rome, Alger
Collaborative pseudonym used by Jerome Bixby and Algis Budrys, on "Underestimation" (September 1953 Rocket Stories). [PN] links / Internet Speculative Fiction Database
Rodney, George Brydges
(1872-1950) US soldier and author, mostly of Westerns, though Edge of the World (1931) is a Lost World novel featuring hostilities between a Roman legion and Mayans before the "discovery" of America; and Beyond the Range (1934) describes the discovery of a Lost Race in more conventional mountainous backlands. [JC]
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. He began to publish work of genre interest with an sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" in Triquarterly for Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959]; he began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and later in ...