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.
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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 ...
Barr, Martin W
(1860-1938) US medical doctor and author; in the former capacity, as superintendent from 1893 to an unknown date of the Pennsylvania Training School for Feeble-Minded Children at Elwyn, he was a strong advocate of the sterilization of "mental defectives" in his care whom he deemed incurable. Of sf interest is his only novel, The King of Thomond: A Story of Yesterday (1907), in the frame story of which the superintendent of a Pennsylvania insane asylum presents the first-person ...
Ferguson, Neil
(1947- ) UK author who began publishing sf with "The Monroe Doctrine" for Interzone, Winter 1983/1984, and through the 1980s released several sharply conceived tales, revealing more than once a deep interest in US life. / His first book, Bars of America (coll 1986), not sf, is a collection of tales and musings set in the heart of that country. His first sf novel, Putting Out (1988), presents a ...
Clowes, W Laird
(1856-1905) UK author who specialized in naval history, sometimes controversially (usually writing as Nautilus); a nonfiction study, Black America: A Study of the Ex-Slave and his Master (1891), predicts a twentieth-century race war. His work of sf interest is exclusively nautical: The Great Naval War of 1887 (1886 St James Gazette; 1887 chap) with Commander C N Robinson, both anonymous, detailedly depicts a French naval victory in a ...
North, Rick
A House Name used for the Young Astronauts Shared-World sf series created for the Young Astronaut Council. Margaret Wander Bonanno, S N Lewitt and John Peel are all contributors to this sequence. [DRL]
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 ...