SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 17 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 ...
Cox, Erle
(1873-1950) Australian author and journalist who began to publish fiction as early as 1908, though he was better known as a reviewer and columnist for The Argus and the Australasian 1918-1946, shifting to The Age from 1946. His best-known sf novel is Out of the Silence; a Romance (19 April-25 October 1919 The Argus; 1925; rev 1932; further rev, cut 1947), about the attempt by the female representative of an otherwise extinct super-race ...
Goldfrap, John Henry
(1879-1917) UK-born US journalist – his family moved to America in 1894 and settled in California – and author of various series of adventures for boys, almost always featuring two or more chums. Goldfrap always wrote under Pseudonyms. His series – only some of sf interest – include the Ocean Wireless Boys; the Boy Aviator Series of Airplane Boys stories, of which one volume, ...
Brown, John Young
(1856-1921) US educator and author. The protagonist of his sf novel, To the Moon and Back in Ninety Days: A Thrilling Narrative of Blended Science and Adventure (1922), hitches a ride on a Spaceship powered by Antigravity device to the Moon. The discovery of Selenites there turns out to be a hoax but the trip was real. The posthumous publication of the tale was arranged by residents of the ...
Houston, David
Pseudonym of US author Houston Force Lumpkin III (1938- ), who produced sf books with some intensity for a few years, though he fell silent after 1982. Generally unremarkable, though competent, his works began with Alien Perspective (1978) and the Gods in a Vortex sf-adventure sequence comprising Gods in a Vortex (1979) and Wingmaster (1981). He then wrote a series of novels Tied to the ...
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 ...