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 ...
Amosov, N
(1913-2002) Russian surgeon – a pioneer of open-heart surgery in the Soviet Union – and author. In his sf novel Zapiski iz budushchego (1965 Nauka i Zhizn; 1967; trans George St George as Notes from the Future 1970 US as by N Amosoff) a frozen sleeper awakens to 1991 (see Sleeper Awakes), where he is cured of leukaemia and reflects somewhat heavily upon the nature of the world of 1991 he has come into, where ...
Mayo, W S
(1811-1895) US physician and author whose Kaloolah; Or, Journeyings to the Djébel Kumri: An Autobiography of Jonathan Romer (1849) [for vts see Checklist] may have taken its hoax-like, factoid-filled story – with Mayo himself posing as the editor of Romer's manuscript – from Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of A Gordon Pym, of Nantucket (1838), and its exotic Fantastic Voyage ...
Charcuterie Mécanique, La
French silent film (1895; vt The Mechanical Butcher). Lumière Brothers. Written and directed by Louis Lumière. Cast unknown. 1 minute. Black and white. / This very short work is probably the first science fiction film ever made – though, as records from the early days of Cinema can be scanty or vague (for example, some sources put the release date as 1895/1896) and many films have been lost, this ...
Unobtainium
The pseudo-Element or alloy unobtainium – sometimes spelt unobtanium – is a traditional, half-serious joke of physics and engineering dating from the mid-twentieth century: it denotes an ideal material from which frictionless bearings, massless levers and other desirable but unfeasible experimental components might be made. It was first formally defined in the US Air Force Air University's Interim Glossary, Aero-Space Terms (1958) by ...
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 ...