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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.
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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 ...
Weird World
UK magazine, quarto-format on poor book paper sufficient to appear like a slim Pulp magazine. Two undated issues, 1955-1956, published by Gannet Press, Birkenhead; edited anonymously. Weird World printed a mixture of sf and fantasy, including some reprints. The fiction was of fairly low quality, though not as bad as the material published by Gannet Press under its original owners. The magazine is very rare, but only a completist would want it. The advertised ...
Origin of Man
An abundant literature dealing with the remote ancestry of the human species inevitably sprang up in the wake of the theory of Evolution, as propounded by Charles Darwin (1809-1882). T H Huxley (1825-1895), the principal champion of Darwinism, published the classic Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), and Darwin himself wrote The Descent of Man (1871) soon after. The main point at issue was, as Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) put ...
Chabria, Priya Sarukkai
(1955- ) Indian poet, translator and author; of sf interest is Generation 14 (2008), whose protagonist, a 14th-generation Clone in twenty-fourth century India, struggles against imposed Amnesia and Sex taboos (see Women in SF). She tells her own story with very considerable intensity. The protagonist of Clone (2019) is the ...
Rimworld
A common item of sf Terminology, denoting a planet in the galactic rim region (see Galactic Lens). Rimworlds are of importance in John Brunner's Interstellar Empire sequence and provide the various settings of A Bertram Chandler's John Grimes/Rim World stories; early stories in Frank Herbert's ...
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 ...