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
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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 ...
Piserchia, Doris
(1928-2021) US author, born and raised in West Virginia, in the US Navy 1950-1954. She began publishing short fiction with "Rocket to Gehenna" in Fantastic for September 1966. Her first novel, the remarkable and densely plotted van Vogt-style revenge drama Mister Justice (1973 dos), appeared after she had established some reputation in shorter forms, one of her stories being included in ...
Kircher, Athanasius
(1602-1680) German Jesuit priest and polymath, author of at least thirty ambitious texts unified by a profound desire to detect and determine and correlate original causes in all phenomena; his influence on later generations has been severely dissipated by his initial, conservative Christian adherence to a geocentric model of the universe (a century after Copernicus), though he changed his mind, and by the fact that – far more than other "sleepwalkers" into ...
Gautier, Judith
Working name of French poet and author Louise Charlotte Ernestine Gautier (1845-1917), daughter of Théophile Gautier, and deeply influenced in her long-standing and intense use of Oriental venues and themes by Pierre Loti (1850-1923). Her stories cannot be thought of easily as sf, but the elaborate and engaging use of myth and traditional motif makes it possible to think of her as a significant figure in the evolution of French ...
Buffery, Judith
(1943- ) UK author known exclusively for her Space-Opera Star Lord Saga: The Sheeg (1979), Saffron (1979), The Iron Clog (dated 1979 but 1980) and Gringol Weed (1980). [JC]
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 ...