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Wednesday 16 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.
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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 ...
Wingrove, David
(1954- ) UK critic and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Photographs" in Focus for Spring 1980, though he has written very little short fiction since, some of it as by Fara Jackson. His career has broken into two logical sequences. Initially he concentrated on critical work, the earliest significant example of which – The Immortals of Science Fiction (1980) – was printed but never officially released, due to the ...
Street & Smith
Important US Magazine publisher, established in the nineteenth century with various dime-novel series like Good News and The Nugget Library, and publishing early juvenile sf in the Tom Edison Jr. and Electric Bob series. The general-fiction The Popular Magazine (1903-1931) published a good few sf stories too. S&S was particularly famous for its Westerns, ...
Devil Girl from Mars
Film (1954; 1955 US). Danziger Productions Ltd/British Lion Film Corporation (UK)/Spartan Films (US). Produced by Edward J Danziger and Harry Lee Danziger. Directed by David MacDonald. Written by James Eastwood from the play by Eastwood and John C Mather. Cast includes Adrienne Corri, Hazel Court, Patricia Laffan, Hugh McDermott and Peter Reynolds. 77 minutes. Black and white. / A flying saucer (see UFOs) with a rotating upper section lands in the ...
Shimmer
US Online Magazine, semi-professional from issue #15 (Summer 2012), also available in print form for its first eighteen issues, though the print issues seldom sold more than 200 copies. It was published and edited by Beth Wodzinski in Salt Lake City, Utah, and planned as a quarterly from Autumn 2005 though it soon appeared only twice yearly from 2007 to 2013, and it was not until it shifted solely to online publication that it was able to appear bi-monthly ...
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 ...