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 ...
Charrette, Robert N
(1953- ) US author and Game designer, often as Bob Charrette. He co-designed the sf Role Playing Games Aftermath (1981) – with a Post-Holocaust setting – and Shadowrun (1989). His fiction consists mostly of sf and fantasy Ties, including game novelizations for the ...
Supervillains
Supervillains (see Villains) were an inevitable consequence of the emergence of Superheroes in Comics and other media, since it quickly became apparent that the pioneering superhero Superman (see DC Comics) and his similarly powerful counterparts could as a rule encounter no meaningful opposition from ordinary criminals to create ...
Bok, Hannes
Pseudonym of US illustrator, author, and astrologer Wayne Francis Woodard (1914-1964). Sf Illustration has had very few mavericks: Bok was possibly the most famous. He did not let editors and publishers dictate the way he designed his work, and thereby lost hundreds of commissions. As Brian W Aldiss notes in Science Fiction Art (1975), he was one of the field's "masters of the macabre", a stylist ...
Colvin, Ian
(1912-1975) UK author and journalist whose sf novel is Domesday Village (1948), a Utopia set in a semi-agrarian Near-Future UK with a socialist regime. [JC]
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 ...