SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 19 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 ...
Chapman, Edgar L
(1936-2019) US academic and sf critic, with the English Department at Bradley University (Peoria, Illinois) 1963-2002, then professor emeritus at Bradley until his death. His solo works include studies of Philip José Farmer and Robert Silverberg: The Magic Labyrinth of Philip José Farmer (1984 chap) and The Road to Castle Mount: The Science Fiction of Robert Silverberg (1999). ...
Peterson, Lorin
(? - ) US author of Ma Windsor (1983), a Near Future Satire on American mores and politics whose protagonist, being elected the first female President of the United States, causes disarray by making the wealthy ineligible to claim social security, reducing the nuclear Weapons stockpile, and bringing all the soldiers home from their international redoubts. ...
Light Novel
Term popularized in Japan for pocket-sized Pulp works of Young Adult fiction, often mistaken for a literary genre. "Light" was originally a statement not of content, but of literal weight, with publishers commonly splitting up larger novels into two- and three-volume chapbooks in order to aid the train-commuting reader. In this regard, the format bears a distant relationship to the "railway novels" once sold in ...
Shirow Masamune
Pen-name and preferred romanization of Masanori Oda (1961- ), a publicity-shy Japanese comics artist crucial to the dissemination of Manga into the international market. Beginning with Areopagus Arther (1980 Atlas), Shirow was published in the fanzine Atlas, home to his early work until he was reprinted by professional publishers. Shirow's meteoric rise in the 1980s found him catching the zeitgeist ...
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 ...