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Monday 7 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 7 July 2025
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Place, François
(1957- ) French illustrator and author, many of whose works [not translated and not listed below] present imaginary maps of various regions as executed by the magi geographers of the Island of Orbæ. After an early career illustrating various authors of children's and Young Adult books, he released Les Derniers Géants (1992 chap; trans William Rodarmor as The Last Giants ...
Gay, Anne
(1952- ) UK teacher and author, married to Stan Nicholls (1949- ), who began publishing sf with "Wishbone" in Gollancz-Sunday Times Best SF Stories (anth 1987) edited anonymously; she has used her married name Anne Nicholls for later short fiction. Her first novel, Mindsail (1990) – like all her works it is a Planetary Romance – promisingly describes an alien planet to ...
Thompson, William Irwin
(1938-2020) US poet, cultural critic and author, founder of the Lindisfarne Association in 1972, which he led until it became inactive in 2012. Within its ecumenical spiritual mission could be detected some evidence (James Lovelock being a member) of a commitment to the concept of Gaia, which Thompson advocates in The nonfiction Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science (1989). Of sf interest is ...
Smith, Kent
(? - ) US author in whose sf novel, Future X (1990), a Black man from a racist twenty-first century discovers a Time-Travel device, returns to the time of Malcolm X (1925-1965) with the intention of saving him from assassination, causes his death months too early, and finds himself bound into taking his place. But history continues as before, for there is no way, the book seems to argue, of curing the system ...
Williams, Sheila
(1956- ) US editor long associated with the magazine Asimov's Science Fiction, where she began her career in 1982, working initially with Shawna McCarthy and then with Gardner Dozois, and on the latter's retirement becoming editor in 2004 (as of the January 2005 issue). She has deftly and responsibly maintained the quality of the magazine in a period when print journals ...
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 ...