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
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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 ...
Cooper, Giles
(1918-1966) Irish actor and screenwriter, a prolific adapter of others' works to radio and television. His original scripts include Loop (1963), about an invasion of present-day Britain from the future, and The Other Man (1964), which he novelized as The Other Man: A Novel Based on his Play for Television (1964), a Hitler Wins tale set in an Alternate History version of post- ...
O'Sheel, Shaemas
(1886-1954) US journalist, poet and author born James Shields, who changed his name as a very young man to its Irish equivalent. He is of sf interest for It Never Could Happen; Or, the Second American Revolution (1932), a future history Future History presented as the 1982 memoir of a key conspirator in the revolution of 1932, which begins in the very Near Future of that year, as the historical "Bonus ...
Rodriguez, Robert
(1968- ) US filmmaker who has repeatedly straddled sf boundaries with other genres: Horror in The Faculty (1998), which draws on and quotes Robert A Heinlein's The Puppet Masters (1951); 1970s exploitation cinema plus Zombies and Monster Movie tropes in ...
Pešek, Luděk
(1919-1999) Czech artist and author, whose first novels (about social inequalities; not sf, but listed below for convenience) were published in Czechoslovakia in the late 1940s, but from 1968, after being exiled by the communist regime, he lived in Switzerland, his books being first published in German translation; they have been widely translated into other languages. His astronomical paintings are well known, and have been featured in National Geographic; one appeared as the cover art ...
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 ...