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 ...
Gate, The
UK Semiprozine, irregular, three issues, published by Richard Newcombe, W Publishing, Peterborough; #1 (Summer) 1989 in pocketbook format edited by Maureen Porter (with help from the Peterborough Science Fiction Club); subsequent issues, #2 undated (Summer 1990) and #3 December 1990, A4 format, edited by Paul Cox. Besides fiction it ran film reviews by Kim Newman and book reviews by various hands. Despite the obvious efforts that ...
Harkins, James W
(1863/1864-1910) US playwright and author of A Prince of the East: A Romance (1900), a Lost Race tale with occult elements set in the Far East. [JC]
Knapp, James
(1970- ) US author whose Revivors sequence comprises State of Decay (2010), which won the Compton Crook/Stephen Tall Memorial Award, The Silent Army (2010) and Element Zero (2011). The series is set in a Near Future Dystopian America whose citizens – in order to avoid military service in the ...
Seymour, Alan [2]
(1927-2015) Australian playwright, broadcaster and author, resident in the UK and elsewhere between 1961 and 1995. His sf novel, The Coming Self-Destruction of the United States of America (1969) – presented as a series of manuscripts found ages hence in the ruins of America (see Ruins and Futurity) and delivered back through time for contemporary readers – features a Black revolution that, though temporarily successful, ...
Nicholls, Peter
(1939-2018) Australian editor and author, primarily a critic and historian of sf through his creation and editing of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction [see below]; resident in the UK 1970-1988, in Australia from 1988; worked as an academic in English literature (1962-1968, 1971-1977), scripted television documentaries, was a Harkness Fellow in Film-making (1968-1970) in the USA, worked as a publisher's editor (1982-1983), often broadcast film and book reviews on BBC Radio from 1974 and ...