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 ...
Forrest, Henry J
(1823-1899) UK compositor, printer's reader, journalist and author of an early sf Utopia, A Dream of Reform (1848), which tamely introduces the usual visitor to a mildly socialist planet designed on anti-industrial lines. The book is thus a vague precursor to the work of William Morris. [JC]
Night Caller, The
Film (1965; vt Blood Beast from Outer Space). Armitage Films. Directed by John Gilling. Written by Jim O'Connolly, from The Night Callers (1960) by Frank R Crisp. Cast includes Alfred Burke, Maurice Denham, Patricia Haines and John Saxon. 84 minutes. Black and white. / Very-low-budget UK film, made with some genuine style by Gilling, who had previously made good horror films for Hammer. However, the story – an ...
Owens, Clarke
(1951- ) US author whose nonfiction work consists mostly of literary criticism, including the unorthodox Biblical study Son of Yahweh: The Gospels as Novels (2013). Two of his novels are of sf interest: 600ppm: A Novel of Climate Change (2015), set in a Dystopian Near Future America where an alliance of profit-hungry corporations and a supine government has shut down any discussion ...
Ad Astra [film]
Film (2019). New Regency Pictures, Bona Film Group, Keep Your Head. Directed by James Gray. Written by Gray and Ethen Gross. Cast includes Loren Dean, Tommy Lee Jones, Ruth Negga, Brad Pitt, Donald Sutherland, Liv Tyler. 123 minutes. Colour. / Several decades into an undated Near Future, the US Space Command sends po-faced Major Roy McBride (Pitt) to Mars on an urgent mission to attempt to communicate at long-distance with 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 ...