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 ...
Hanshew, Mary E
(1852-1927) US-born author – later in the UK – of some detective thrillers including The Frozen Flame (April-July Short Stories as "The Riddle of the Frozen Flame"; 1920; vt The Riddle of the Frozen Flame 1920) with her husband T W Hanshew, in the Riddle/Hamilton Cleek sequence of thrillers, almost entirely without fantastic content (but see her husband's for further details of the Hamilton Cleek ...
Gardner, Maurice B
(1905-1977) US machinist for a Maine railroad and author of the Bantan series of novels, set on a South Pacific Island, but directly influenced by Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose Tarzan books he began reading at an early age; the series, whose sf content is borderline, begins with Bantan, God-Like Islander (1936; vt Bantan of the Islands 1957), includes a ...
Velasquez, Pedro
Pseudonym of the unidentified author – possibly a carnival showman named Walter J Morris (? -? ) – of a short hoax Lost Race tale, Memoir of an Eventful Expedition in Central America: Resulting in the Discovery of the Idolatrous City of Iximaya [for full title see Checklist below] (1850 chap), describing an expedition to the state of Chiapas, Mexico, where a vast City is ...
Treggiari, Jo
(1965- ) UK-born author in Canada from an early age. The Curious Misadventures of Feltus Ovalton (2006), for younger children, carries its child protagonist to various Monster-packed Parallel Worlds, more or less by Magic;the young protagonist of the Young Adult tales Ashes, Ashes (2011) survives in Central Park a ...
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 ...