SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 18 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
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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 ...
Rudaux, Lucien
(1874-1947) French astronomer and popular-science author and illustrator whose Sur les autres mondes ["On Other Worlds"] (1937) contains many examples of space art, imagining – in terms of current scientific knowledge – the landscapes of the Moon and other planets of our solar system. His depiction of the Moon's surface as consisting of rolling landscapes with rounded mountains and hills (Rudaux even explained his ...
Machine, The
Film (2013). Red & Black Films. Directed and written by Caradog W James. Cast includes Jade Croot, Helen Griffin, Pooneh Hajimohammadi, Denis Lawson, Caity Lotz, Jean-Paul Macleod and Toby Stephens. 91 minutes. Colour. / There is no backstory; by the year 2013, it may be, the makers of The Machine felt none would be necessary. The viewer is dumped in medias res into a desolate surveillance-heavy Near Future England just as a ...
Stannard, Russell
(1931- ) UK physicist and author, much of whose nonfiction attempts to reconcile modern science and Religion. He is of sf interest for the Uncle Albert series of didactic tales for relatively young readers beginning with The Time and Space of Uncle Albert (1989). The structure of the sequence – children present Uncle Albert with questions, which he answers through guided tours of the physical universe – ...
Visual Novel
Term popularized in Japan for a text-based Videogame usually enhanced with Anime-style illustrations and audio dialogue; not to be confused or conflated with the Graphic Novel. Although marketing for visual novels (VNs) is apt to describe them as enhanced, interactive books, they might just as easily be described as Adventure games with ...
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 ...