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 ...
Cannan, Gilbert
(1884-1955) UK translator, poet and author whose career was truncated by insanity. His first novel, Peter Homunculus (1909), is a hyperventilated tale of sexual and cultural entrapment, not fantastic. Of his subsequent wide-spread output before he was institutionalized in 1924, Windmills: A Book of Fables (coll of linked stories 1915) is of sf interest, its four long tales all dealing with the inconsistently allegorical Fatland: in two of them, a floating ...
Richardson, E
Working name of Edith Richardson (1867-1935), UK illustrator and author who also published as Emmeline Richardson and as Eva Richardson. Neutopia (1925), a tale Equipoisal between the Scientific Romance and the formal Utopia, depicts a Lost World come upon by male explorers, even though it is protected by a desert (whose location is not given). Here a ...
Gilbert, John
(1926- ) US author whose sf novel, Aiki (1986), sets a gladiatorial martial-arts tale in twenty-first-century New York. [JC]
Kerr, Philip
(1956-2018) Scottish author, married to Jane Thynne (see C J Carey) until his death, who first came to notice for his Bernard Gunther sequence, the first volumes of which – beginning with March Violets (1989) – are police procedurals set in pre-World War Two Berlin, but which move into occult territory after Gunther has survived the war. Much of his later work is of direct sf interest, beginning ...
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 ...