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 ...
Westlake, Donald E
(1933-2008) US author, mostly of detective novels and thrillers, often humorous, under his own name and under several pseudonyms, notably Richard Stark; he won three Edgar awards, including a Grandmaster award in 1993. He began publishing sf – always of secondary interest in his career, though never carelessly done – with "Or Give Me Death" in Universe Science Fiction for November 1954, and assembled much of his short work in ...
Big Dumb Objects
A jocular though affectionate piece of sf Terminology which seems to have been coined by Roz Kaveney in her retrospective essay "Science Fiction in the 1970s" (June 1981 Foundation), with specific reference to the titular Macrostructure of Larry Niven's Ringworld (1970). The term became ...
Mark V Ziesing
US Small Press. Mark V Ziesing was the direct successor to Ziesing Brothers, which booksellers Michael Ziesing (1946-2022) and his brother Mark V Ziesing (1953- ) had founded in Willimantic, Connecticut, initially to publish poetry, but which then produced two books by Gene Wolfe: The Castle of the Otter (coll 1982) and The Wolfe Archipelago (coll 1983). ...
Chronister, Kay
(? - ) US author, best known for horror fiction in short story form, beginning with "The Warriors, the Mothers, the Drowned" in Beneath Ceaseless Seas for 28 May 2015, much of this work being assembled as Thin Places (coll 2020). Her first novel, the Young Adult Desert Creatures (2022), conveys its young protagonist and her father on a Fantastic Voyage ...
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 ...