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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 ...
Interactive Narrative
The outcome of any given game is inherently uncertain, since it must be possible to win or lose (or, in the case of Toy Games, to play at will). Yet stories, as normally understood, should have a beginning, a middle and an end, and only one of each. Games which include stories – referred to in this encyclopedia as Interactive Narratives – have thus proved difficult to design. There has also been considerable debate as to whether it is desirable, or even ...
Ingrey, Derek
(1929-1989) UK scriptwriter for television and film and author whose Post-Holocaust sf novel, Pig on a Lead (1963), describes the dead-end life of the last surviving humans in the UK – two men, who soon kill each other, and a boy Last Man figure, who survives in the company of a young Eve-figure (see Adam and Eve) and the eponymous pig. Told in a remarkable pot pourri of styles, ...
Brown, Slater
(1896-1997) US author, perhaps best known as "B", E E Cummings's cellmate in his famous memoir of World War One, The Enormous Room (1922). Brown's own writing career was relatively desultory, though he published at least two books of genre interest: The Talking Skyscraper (1945) is a children's tale about a New York skyscraper dissatisfied with its (his) lot; Spaceward Bound (1955) is a ...
Williams, Michael Lindsay
(1940- ) US author who published the two volume Mars sequence comprising Martian Spring (1986) and FTL: Further Than Life (1987), which tackles conflicts between Earth and Mars, and consequent attempts to transcend these ills by gaining rapport with a transplanetary group mind; verve and clarity are lacking. / Williams should not be confused with the Michael Williams involved in various DragonLance ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...