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Saturday 19 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 ...
Spoor, Ryk E
(1962- ) US author most of whose work has been action-heavy Space Opera, though his first book, Digital Knight (coll of linked stories 2003), is a set of closely linked tales whose narrator, the eponymous Computer-expert private eye, uncovers a complex Alternate World through his discovery of the existence of Vampires and other ...
Hamlin, V T
(1900-1993) US Comics writer and artist who created the Alley Oop (which see) comic strip in 1932, initially as Prehistoric SF but later ranging much more widely via Time Travel, beginning with Alley Oop: The First Time Travel Adventure (6 March 1939-23 March 1940 Alley Oop; graph 2013); there is even a trip to the Moon in ...
Chivers, Greg
(? - ) UK Television producer and author, active in the making of documentary programmes from around 2005. His first novel, The Crying Machine (2019), is set in a moderately distant Near Future Jerusalem, some time after World War Three has been succeeded by a further planetary conflict. Europe and America, in terms reminiscent of ...
Bennett, Arnold
(1867-1931) UK journalist and author whose more ambitious work – in particular the Five Towns novels, the best known of these being The Old Wives' Tale (1908) – made no use of the fantastic. In the 1890s some fantastical tales, and several book reviews, were published as by Sarah Volatile; the fiction was assembled with other work, as Arnold Bennett's Uncollected Short Stories 1892-1932 (coll 2010) edited by John Shapcott. Bennett was a friend and ...
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 ...