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.
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 ...
Black Terror, The
US Comic (1943-1949). Nedor Publishing Company/Visual Editions Inc. 27 issues. Artists include Al Camy, Mort Meskin, Ed Moritz, Jerry Robinson and Alex Schomburg. Scriptwriters include Donald Bayne Hobart, Richard Hughes and Charles S Strong. Originally 68 pages, then declining until #26 and #27 had only 36. Usually four long strips per issue, a couple with five, whilst #26 and #27 had three; there would also be at least one text ...
Costello, Jamie
Pseudonym of UK author Laura Wilson (1964- ), who under her own name has published nonfiction as well as the nonfantastic DI Stratton historical thriller series, set in 1950s London [the sequence is not listed below]. Costello is of sf interest for the Young Adult novel Monochrome (2022), set in a Near Future Dystopian world afflicted by industrial ...
Coulton, Jonathan
(1970- ) US singer-songwriter, whose prolific early work in 2005-2006 was particularly notable for its use of sf tropes in wistfully comic first-person songs about geek masculinity, especially in the EP Where Tradition Meets Tomorrow (2005). In "Better" the singer's girlfriend is slowly turning into a Cyborg; in "The Future Soon" a teenager fantasizes about a career as a robotically augmented ...
Balsdon, Dacre
(1901-1977) academic, historian and author, who signed his nonfiction as J P V D Balsdon, Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford 1927-1969; his sf novels are humorous Satires on contemporary mores, little allowance being made for technological, social or behavioural change. The most imaginative, Sell England? (1936), is a Dystopia set 1000 years hence in which the UK is inhabited solely by a decadent aristocracy, while the other ...
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 ...