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
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
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 ...
Villains
The division of people into simple archetypes of good and bad, Heroes and villains, has always been stronger in popular literature than in more serious fiction; indeed, the essence of the serious novel of character has ever been to explore the shades of grey between the moral absolutes of black and white. Thus sf's villains are mainly associated with Pulp-magazine sf, not just in the post-1926 specialist sf magazines but in the pulp magazines ...
Moroz, Anne
(1953- ) US author of a Near Future sf novel, No Safe Place (1986), whose protagonist alone survives after the death or incurable insanity of all her colleagues on a Spaceship during an encounter with Alien artefacts; on her return to Earth, she is scapegoated by the corporation that owns the ship, and sent back to unravel, for profit, the mystery of the artefacts. ...
Pinky & The Brain
US animated tv series (1995-1998). Warner Bros. Animation. Executive producer: Steven Spielberg. Writers include Charles M Howell IV, Tom Sheppard, Wendell Morris, Earl Kress and Jed Spingarn. Directors include Kirk Tingblad, Charles Visser, Nelson Recinos and Russell Calabrese. Voice cast includes Maurice LaMarche and Rob Paulsen. 65 22-minute episodes plus 18 Animaniacs segments and 13 Pinky, Elmyra & The Brain episodes. Colour. / ...
Games and Sports
This entry deals with games and sports as a theme within sf. Games based on sf are treated under a wide variety of headwords branching out from the Games entry. / Just as sf's concern with the Arts has been dominated by stories about the decline of artistry in a mechanized mass society, so its concern with sports has been much involved with representing the decline of sportsmanship. There was a marked tendency, in sf from the second half ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...