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 ...
Forest, Louis
Pseudonym of French lawyer, politician, playwright and author Louis Nathan (1872-1933), who is of sf interest for On Vole des Enfants à Paris ["We Steal Children in Paris"] (25 June-23 September 1906 Le Matin as "Le Voleur d'enfants"; cut 1909; trans Brian Stableford as Someone Is Stealing Children in Paris 2013), in which a morally ambivalent figure of German origin is enlisted to solve the mysterious kidnapping ...
Crane, Elizabeth
Pseudonym of Dan S Trent (1946- ) and Lynda Trent (1942- ), US authors of a Time Travel historical romance, Reflections in Time (1992), which carries its troubled protagonist from contemporary times to 1880s Louisiana; most of their work is paranormal romance, and is not listed here. This "Crane" should not be confused with the New York-born Elizabeth Crane whose first book is ...
Barker, D A
(1947- ) UK telecommunications engineer and author whose first two novels were sf published by Robert Hale Limited: A Matter of Evolution (1975), in which a Mutant race on Earth imports female humanoids for research, and A Question of Reality (1981). [DRL]
Holmes, Clara H
(1838-1927) US author, active from the mid-1860s, whose collection, Floating Fancies Among the Weird and the Occult (coll 1898), contains a Lost Race tale, "Nordhung Nordjansen", whose sea-captain protagonist guides his ship to the North Pole, which is indeed a magnetic pole; from there, he is cast into a Hollow Earth as described by John Cleves Symmes, whose "mist being" ...
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 ...