SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 ...
Aldunate, Elena
(1925-2005) Working name of Chilean author María Elena Aldunate Bezanilla, one of the first women in that country to produce a sizeable body of sf, though she wrote Utopian fantasies and realist works as well. She was vice president and co-founder, along with Hugo Correa, Roberto Pliscoff and Andrés Rojas Murphy, of the Club Chileno de Ciencia Ficción [Chilean SF Club] in the early 1970s. / Aldunate's ...
Whale, James
(1889-1957) UK-born Hollywood director, in active service during World War One; his career in US Cinema began in 1929. His first film of genre interest was the classic adaptation of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus (1818; rev 1831) as Frankenstein (1931), a highly influential ...
Powell, Gerald
Working name of UK author William Gerald Howell Powell Edwards (1891-1955), in active service during World War One. His All Things New (1926) is a Scientific Romance in which a Scientist, through the power of his Inventions, successfully ends all War. [JC]
Alternate History
An alternate history – some writers and commentators prefer the designation "alternative history" on grammatical grounds, some use the unelucidative Counterfactual, and others apply the term "uchronia" (see Charles Bernard Renouvier) – is an account of Earth (sometimes extending to exploration of solar-system space) as it might have become in consequence of some hypothetical alteration in history (see ...
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 ...