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 ...
Rolling Stones, The
UK blues-rock band formed in 1962 which has enjoyed, to some degree, both celebrity and longevity. The group is led by vocalist Mick Jagger (1943- ) and guitarist Keith Richards (1943- ), who together write most of the group's songs; the long-time drummer, from 1963, was Charlie Watts (1941-2021). The Rolling Stones merit mention here primarily for the album Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967), an uncharacteristically psychedelic ...
Famous Fantastic Mysteries
US Pulp magazine which published 81 issues, September/October 1939 to June 1953. It was monthly after the first issue, but bimonthly from May/June 1940. Its popularity was such that it returned to a monthly schedule in June 1942, after it had combined with its short-lived companion Fantastic Novels, but during the World War Two years publication was quarterly and sometimes irregular. It returned to a bimonthly schedule in December ...
Stabenow, Dana
(1952- ) US author now best known for a nonfantastic private-investigator series, the Kate Shugak sequence set in the author's native Alaska. Her first fiction, however, was sf: the Star Svensdotter sequence comprising Second Star (1991), A Handful of Stars (1991) and Red Planet Run (1995), which describes the fraught Near Future expansion of Homo sapiens starwards, thwarted by ...
Christ
Jesus Christ or Jesus of Nazareth, the central figure of the Christian Religion, is here considered solely in the sf context as a frequent (though rarely foregrounded) Icon character in genre fiction. Perhaps the first notable Genre SF appearance is in Ray Bradbury's "The Man" (February 1949 Thrilling Wonder), featuring successive incarnations on ...
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 ...