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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 ...
Randle, Kevin D
(1949- ) US author who served in the Army as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam 1968-1969 and in the Air Force as an Intelligence Officer 1976-1986; he has written nonfantastic military fiction as by Eric Helm and Steve MacKenzie [not listed in Checklist below]. He began publishing sf with "Future War" for Combat Illustrated in 1978, but became an active writer only in the 1980s, beginning two sequences in 1980 and 1986 respectively, all titles in collaboration with ...
Agnew, Spiro T
(1918-1996) American politician who served as governor of Maryland (1967-1969) and as vice president under Richard Nixon (1969-1973) until he was forced to resign in late 1973 after pleading no contest to a charge of tax evasion. He then tried his hand at fiction with The Canfield Decision (1976), an inept, widely derided Technothriller involving the efforts of an unscrupulous vice president to gain control of America in 1983; his machinations ...
Mundy, Talbot
Pseudonym of UK-born author William Lancaster Gribbon (1879-1940), who emigrated to the USA in 1909 after his early life as a confidence man, ivory poacher and all-round rogue in India and British Africa had culminated in the threat – not in the event realized – of a prison sentence. He soon became a professional author, with most of his work first appearing in Adventure magazine, where he became the star writer; after 1935 he left ...
Dwiggins, W A
(1880-1956) US author on typography, greatly influential book designer and, through his association with the Mergenthaler Linotype Company, creator of at least a dozen typefaces, the most famous of them being Electra and Caledonia; from 1922 he called himself a "graphic designer", and is credited with inventing the term. Dwiggins is known within the sf field for designing and illustrating the luxurious 1931 edition of H G Wells's The Time Machine. Often in ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...