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
Sponsor of the day: Ansible Editions
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 ...
Forward, Robert L
(1932-2002) US physicist and author, senior scientist at Hughes Research Laboratories and one of the most devoted Hard-SF authors of the 1980s; married to Martha Dodson Forward, father of Julie Forward Fuller (with whom he has collaborated on sf) and supernatural fiction author Robert Dodson Forward (1958- ). He began publishing sf with "The Singing Diamond" (February 1979 ...
Wallace, Nick
(1972- ) UK media consultant and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Five Dimensional Thinking" in Life During Wartime (anth 2003) edited by Paul Cornell, like most of his work a contribution to the Doctor Who universe, in this case the Bernice Summerfield subseries. Fear Itself (2005) is set in the Doctor Who BBC Past Doctors subseries. ...
Bell, Derrick
(1930-2011) US lawyer, academic and author, a central figure in the creation of what became known as "critical race theory", the argument that racism – which as a Black lawyer he had been involved in combating – was so inherent in American society that apparent reductions in segregation and discrimination would be cosmetic. The basic institutional racism of America, he argued, would inevitably reassert itself to the advantage of the already advantaged. / Though he wrote ...
Parsec
The official SI unit of astronomical distance; the name is a contraction of "parallax-second". The measure was introduced by UK astronomer Herbert Hall Towner (1861-1930). As the Earth travels from one side of the Sun to the other in half a year, parallax makes the position of any comparatively nearby star apparently shift. Using simple trigonometry, from the observed angular displacement of the star's measured position and knowledge of the distance between Earth and Sun the distance of the ...
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. He began to publish work of genre interest with an sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" in Triquarterly for Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959]; he began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and later in ...