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
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
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 ...
Jordan, Hillary
(1963- ) US author whose second novel, When She Woke (2011), is set in a Near Future America where church and state are no longer separate, and a fundamentalist Dystopia has been established according to whose diktats women are scapegoated and treated as breeders. The homage to Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850) – on being ...
Jiang Yunsheng
(1944- ) Chinese author, translator and occasional poet on Equipoisal themes. Jiang graduated in history from Shanghai's Fudan University in 1967, and remained in an academic career, retiring as a professor of Chinese literature at the Shanghai TV University. Striking for its adult themes at a time when so much Chinese sf was Children's SF his "Wubian de Jianlian" (November 1987 ...
Alt Hist
UK low-paying Magazine which ran for ten issues from October 2010 to February 2017; published and edited by Mark Lord in Hertfordshire, at irregular intervals once or twice a year, available both as a Print Magazine and Ebook. It was primarily intended as a magazine of historical fiction but also featured Alternate History which usually provided about half the ...
Samuelson, David N
(1939- ) US sf critic and professor of English at California State University, Long Beach. His PhD dissertation (University of Southern California) was later published by Arno Press as a book, Visions of Tomorrow: Six Journeys from Outer to Inner Space (1975): it contains analyses of novels by Isaac Asimov, J G Ballard, Algis ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...