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 ...
Hervey, Maurice H
(circa 1854-? ) UK journalist and author active at the end of the nineteenth century. The protagonist of his sf novel, David Dimsdale, M.D.: A Story of Past and Future (1897), awakens in 1920 (see Sleeper Awakes) to find ubiquitous electrical advances plus the daughter of the woman he'd loved in 1895. He ends up marrying the daughter. [JC]
Warrick, Patricia S
(1925-2023) US academic, most of whose work has concentrated upon the themes explicated in the book version of her PhD thesis, The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction (1980), an impressively thorough study that concentrates on the work of Isaac Asimov, including an analysis of the Encyclopedia Galactica which serves as Hari Seldon's electronic bible in the Foundation series; her analysis is supplemented by ...
Black Rain
US electronic/industrial group formed in New York in 1989, who formed an association with William Gibson in the 1990s. In 1994, they teamed up with him to produce an audio version of Neuromancer (1984). The music they produced for the audiobook was given a stand-alone release for the novel's 40th anniversary in 2024. Divorced from Gibson's narration, the would-be futuristic electronics ironically now sound thoroughly time-bound, but do ...
Ni Kuang
Main writing name of Ni Cong (1935-2022), a Chinese author whose life began unpromisingly as a teenage drop-out, before his swift rise through the ranks of the Communist Party security police. Accused of counter-revolutionary activities, he fled to Hong Kong in 1957 and embraced anti-Communist fiction with all the zeal of a convert. His first professional sale, the non-genre Huomai ["Buried Alive"] (December 1957 Keung Sheung Daily News) was a grotesque ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...