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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 ...
McCarthy, Wil
Working name of US engineer and author William Terence McCarthy (1966- ) who began publishing sf with "What I Did with the OTV Grissom" for Aboriginal in May/June 1990; his first book appearance was the very thin chapbook Dirtyside Down (1991 chap dos). In his first novel, Aggressor Six (1994), which begins the two-volume Waisters sequence concluding with The Fall of Sirius (1996), ...
Night of the Lepus
Film (1972). Lyles/MGM. Directed by William F Claxton. Written by Don Holliday, Gene R Kearney, based on The Year of the Angry Rabbit (1964) by Russell Braddon. Cast includes Rory Calhoun, DeForest Kelley, Janet Leigh and Stuart Whitman. 88 minutes. Colour. / Braddon's satirical novel was set in Australia, but the film dropped the Satire and switched the setting to Arizona. A test rabbit full of ...
Ballou, William Hosea
(1857-1937) US author of several mild satires about social life in the American upper classes. His three novels of some genre interest are A Ride on a Cyclone (1889); The Bachelor Girl: A Novel of the 1400 (1890), which features a very fast motorized Balloon plus a romance; and The Upper Ten: A Novel of the Snobocracy (1890), in which a submarine Lost Race of mermen (see ...
Death Ray, The
Russian silent film (1925; original title Luch Smerti). Goskino, Directed by Lev Kuleshov. Written by Vsevolod Pudovkin. Cast includes Vladimir Fogel, Aleksandra Khokhlova, Sergei Komarov, Leonid Obolensky, Porfiri Podobed, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Anya Stravinskaya. 125 minutes (but some of the film is missing, most notably the ending). Black and white. / Somewhere in the West a rebellion by factory workers has been crushed, with many killed. Then we ...
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 ...