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 ...
Rathborne, St George
(1854-1938) US author, often of Dime Novels under many names, including Harrison Adams, Herbert Carter, Oliver Lee Clifton and Harry St George. Under the Gulf; or, The Strange Voyage of the Torpedo Boat (1889 chap), tells of treasure-hunting Under the Sea in the submarine Vampire, with some mild conflict; the influence of Jules Verne's ...
Hawkins, Jane E
(1951-2022) US mathematician, engineer and computer programmer, long active in Fandom, where she worked on many Conventions including the 1989 Worldcon. Her one sf novel is Quantum Gate (1996), whose titular device provides the Ecologically devastated Earth of 2057 with access to a Parallel World rich in mineral resources, in ...
Panatier, Chris
(? - ) US lawyer, painter, illustrator, poet and author, active in his first profession from 2001 with a focus on representing victims of toxic exposure, in particular asbestos poisoning. His work as an author dates from 2015 or earlier; he began to publish work of genre interest with "The Eighth Fathom" in Metaphorosis for March 2020. His first novel, The Phlebotomist (2020), is set in a ...
Griffin, Russell M
(1943-1986) US academic and author who began publishing sf with his first novel, The Makeshift God (1979), an ambitiously overwritten and overlong but notably intelligent romance of origins, set initially in a drab Arab-dominated marginally pre-Cyberpunk USA, and then on a planet which houses mysteriously significant data about the deep human past. Century's End (1981) takes another blackly satirical look at the ...
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 ...