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 ...
Dr Who and the Daleks
Film (1965). AARU. Directed by Gordon Flemyng. Written by Milton Subotsky, based on the second Doctor Who television story, the seven-episode The Mutants (1963-1964; also known as The Dead Planet and The Daleks) by Terry Nation. Cast includes Roy Castle, Peter Cushing, Jenny Linden and Roberta Tovey. 85 minutes. Colour. / The Doctor – played colourlessly by Cushing as a polite old man ...
Mayhew, Julie
(? - ) UK actor, playwright and author whose first novel, the Young Adult Red Ink (2013), engages peripherally with supernatural material. Her second novel, The Big Lie (2015), is a Hitler Wins tale set in an Alternate History Britain under German rule around 2014, and conflates its protagonist's coming of age with the gradual ...
McIver, G
(1859-1945) Scottish-born author, whose name was registered at birth as MacIver, in Australia from 1861; his Neuroomia: A New Continent: A Manuscript Delivered from the Deep (1894) routinely uncovers a clement Lost World in the Antarctic inhabited by a long-lived high-tech folk who inform us that Mars is inhabited and spins off her excess population by dumping them on a visiting planet. [JC]
Shaggy God Story
Term coined by Brian W Aldiss for the once-common sf Cliché of crudely rationalized Biblical myth. A typical specimen would derive its entire impact, or lack of impact, from the revelation that two experimental lifeforms released to populate an empty world are in fact Adam and Eve (which see for further discussion). Defining "shaggy god story" in his short-lived "Dr Peristyle" column for ...
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 ...