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 ...
Innes, Michael
Pseudonym used by Scots author and academic J I M Stewart (1906-1994) for his many detective and thriller novels published from 1936 to 1986, often featuring series character John Appleby in various official roles from detective-inspector to Sir John Appleby, Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, and onward through a long, active retirement. Though often fantastical and donnishly whimsical, these tales normally keep sf devices at arm's length or play with them only speculatively. In the ...
Grimes, Lee
(1920-2009) US author whose Ax of Atlantis: A Chandra Smith Adventure (1975) depicts its female secret agent protagonist's attempts to forestall the attempts of a kind of reborn Minos to re-establish the rule of ancient Crete. An earlier Chandra Smith adventure, The Eye of Shiva (1974), seems to have no fantastic content. The premise of Retro Lives (1993) is that a genetic predisposition can generate a Time Loop, ...
Yamamoto, Makana
(? - ) US author whose first novel, the Near-Future Hammajang Luck (2024), is mostly set on a vast Space Station known as Kepler, the headquarters of trillionaire Joyce Atlas's malevolent multi-world corporation, whose surveillance-based control over and profit-taking from Communications systems and AI projects give ...
Edwards, Janet
(1958- ) UK author whose Young Adult Jarra sequence, comprising to date Earth Girl (2012), Earth Star (2013) and Earth Flight (2014), begins in the twenty-eighth-century ruins of New York, where the young orphan protagonist – stigmatized as a "Neanderthal" (see Apes as Human) amongst her ...
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 ...