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.
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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 ...
Williams, Ralph
(1914-1959) Working name of Ralph William Slone, US author of almost a dozen stories published in Astounding and other SF Magazines from 1940 to 1959. "Business as Usual, During Alterations" (July 1958 Astounding) deals optimistically with the Economics of free commodities made available by Matter Duplication, suggesting that this ...
Whitelaw, David
(1875-1971) UK illustrator, editor, journalist and author, active for many years from about 1890. He wrote a considerable amount of popular fiction, usually thrillers but including much rather good supernatural fiction. He was editor of The London Magazine 1910-1931 and of The Premier Magazine for its entire run, 1914-1931; he published weird fiction and sf in both. The authors he encouraged included Sax Rohmer ...
InterText
US amateur Online Magazine produced and edited by Jason Snell (1970- ). It ran for 57 issues from March 1991 to December 2004, maintaining a bimonthly schedule for 49 of those issues up to Fall 1999. Although InterText was not dedicated wholly to science fiction, the majority of its contents was Speculative Fiction and Fantasy: it was one of the earliest such ...
Scribe Award
The Scribe Awards for media Ties have been presented since 2007 by the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers [see under links below]. There are various award categories, genre-specific and otherwise, which changed frequently in the early years but currently include novels, short fiction and audiobooks. The Scribe Grandmaster award – also known as the Faust Award in honour of Frederick Faust (see Max ...
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 ...