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 ...
Manning, P L
(? - ) UK author, possibly pseudonymous, whose sf novel, The Destroyers (1958), is set on Mars, some time after Earth has been destroyed in a nuclear World War Three. After surviving for some time, the Genetically Engineered human remnant on Mars is driven back to Earth by the original Martians, who have suddenly returned to their home ...
Boston, John
(1948- ) US lawyer, long-term sf fan, and author with Damien Broderick of a useful overview of Science Fantasy magazine – Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-1967 (2013) – and two volumes similarly covering New Worlds: Building New Worlds, 1946-1959: The Carnell Era, Volume One (2013) and ...
Patton, Frank
Apparently a Ziff-Davis house name, used 1943-1954 for stories and essays in Amazing, Fantastic and Science Stories by the editor Raymond A Palmer, Richard S Shaver, Leroy Yerxa and perhaps others. [DRL] links / ...
Walker, Karen Thompson
(1980- ) US creative writing instructor and author in whose first novel, the Young Adult The Age of Miracles (2012), a teenager awakens in a Near Future suburb to find that her inner turmoils are mirrored at a planetary level, with Earth slowing in orbit and Gravity suffering distortions, all of which puts her coming of age at risk. In Walker's second novel, ...
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 ...