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 ...
Skurzynski, Gloria
(1930- ) US author from the 1970s of fiction and nonfiction for Young Adult markets; in her first sf novel, Cyberstorm (1995), a young girl finds herself trapped in a Virtual Reality room meant to re-create a world of happy memories for its elderly owner; wrongness soon pervades the enclave. Skurzynski's Virtual War Chronologs sequence beginning with Virtual War (1997) ...
Le Breton, Thomas
Pseudonym of UK author Thomas Murray Ford (1854-1932) who usually published in the Boys' Papers; he also wrote as John Le Breton. Of sf interest is The Submarine Privateer: A Tale of the Great Boer War; And, "The Land of Mystery": A Story of Indian Marvels (coll 1905), the first story describing the Invention and deployment of a superior submarine, and the second locating a Lost World ...
Walworth, Mansfield Tracy
(1830-1873) US author, almost certainly best known for the circumstances of his marriage and death: he married his stepsister Ellen Hardin Walworth (1832-1915) and abused her until she left him, after which their son Frank murdered him. It seems clearly the case that contortions of fustian, and almost random-seeming allusions to evocative subjects like Atlantis, have made his fiction difficult to parse meaningfully. But a tale like ...
Clark, Jan
(? - ) US author, mainly known for the two volumes of her Prodigy sequences of Space Operas comprising Prodigy (1997) and Earth Herald (1998), featuring Rieka Degahv, female captain of a military spaceship who becomes embroiled in an interstellar intrigue designed to topple a commonwealth of species, in which humans are present but do not dominate. The fast pace and claustrophobic ...
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 ...