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: The Telluride Institute
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 ...
Busch, Niven
(1903-1991) US screenwriter and author, active in Hollywood from the early 1930s and best known as a writer for the effectively erotized, soon-filmed Western Duel in the Sun (1944); he is of sf interest for The Titan Game (1989), a Technothriller set in the very Near Future; the tale's protagonist, unwilling inheritor of his father's Weapons ...
Cole, Burt
Pseudonym of US author Thomas Dixon (1930- ), best known as the author of The Funco File (1969), in which a world-dominating Computer is pitted against anarchic opposing forces; eccentric and initially useless-seeming Psi Powers are deployed. His other titles of genre interest are Subi: The Volcano (1957), a savage Near Future tale set in an Asia ...
Newell, C M
(1823-1909) US doctor, sailor and author, who began publishing non-fantastic sea-stories as by Captain Robert Barnacle, though Leaves from an Old Log: Pehe Nu-e, or The Tiger Whale of the Pacific (1877) is of some interest for its reworkings of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851); several works under his own name were set in or around the Hawaii Archipelago, including ...
Eichberg, Søren Nils
(1973- ) German composer of Danish heritage. Two of his operas make use of sf themes. Glare (2014), with libretto by Hannan Dübgen, may or may not be sf, as it is never made clear whether one of the characters is in fact an Artificial Intelligence (see AI). More explicitly sf, Oryx and Crake (2023), also with libretto by Dübgen, is based on Oryx and Crake (2003) by ...
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 ...