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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 ...
Otterbourg, Edwin M
(1885-1967) US lawyer, judge and author, of some sf interest for his alice sequence beginning with Alice in Rankbustland: (With Apologies to Lewis Carroll) (1923 chap), a Satire on what he deemed absurd legal strictures on the execution of bankruptcies (see Economics); the tale, placing elements of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (1864) in a kind of ...
Williams, Neil Wynn
(1864-1940) UK author, whose two volumes of his versions of Greek folklore, Tales and Sketches of Modern Greece (coll 1894) and the Bayonet That Came Before: A Vanity of Modern Greece (coll 1896), are of very modest interest. In his sf novel, The Electric Theft (1906), highly organized anarchists are abstracting huge amounts of electricity from a great plant in Athens but, more seriously, the mastermind and Villain Stavinsky ...
Ecology
Ecology is the study of organisms in relation to their environment. It is a relatively new discipline, the first notable work on the subject being Animal Ecology (1927) by Charles Elton (1900-1991), a text which did much to establish ecology as an independent field of study. The complexity of the environmental relationships which determine the success, or even the survival, of populations has been realized only within the last half-century. The same period has seen a dramatic ...
Kelleher, Victor
(1939- ) UK-born Australian teacher and author, in Africa for about twenty years before emigrating to New Zealand in 1973 and then Australia in 1976; he has written some horror as by Veronica Hart. Kelleher's major narrative concerns, in his sf and Fantasy (he makes no sharp distinction between the two genres) for Young Adult readers, seem to be the resolving of conflicts between cyclic/seasonal time and linear ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...