SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 20 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 ...
Davis, Chandler
(1926-2022) US mathematician, academic and author, in Canada from 1960, after serving a short prison term for refusing to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee and subsequently losing his position as professor at the University of Michigan; in 1991, the university initiated the annual "Davis, Markert, Nickerson Lecture on Academic Freedom" (Mark Nickerson and Clement Markert had also been dismissed after refusing to testify). As a mathematician, he published many influential ...
Marvel Comics
Eventually named for its first Comic – much as DC Comics was named after Detective Comics – Marvel was founded by Martin Goodman (1910-1992) as Timely Comics before, in the 1950s, being renamed Atlas Comics after its distribution company; it became Marvel Comics in 1963. Marvel Comics #1 (November 1939) featured two of the company's three early mainstays. The Human Torch was an ...
Pearl, Jack
(1923-1992) US author of the Space Eagle sequence, comprising The Space Eagle: Operation Doomsday (1967) and The Space Eagle: Operation Star Voyage (1967), and Tied, unusually, to an individual, Raymond J Meurer. The stories are written for the Young Adult market and involve Inventions implausible in their Near Future 1970s context, including ...
Chetwynd, Bridget
(1910-1970) UK author, mother of Tom Chetwynd; in her sf novel, Future Imperfect (1946), women run the world (see Feminism), leaving men behind, though romantic elements intervene. [JC]
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 ...