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
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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 ...
Weston, Peter
(1943-2017) UK sf fan and editor, active initially in the 1960s and 1970s. He published the well-regarded critical Fanzine Speculation 1963-1973 (originally titled Zenith), contributed a column to Vector 1966-1968 as by Malcolm Edwards (not to be confused with Malcolm Edwards), organized the three sf Speculation Conferences in Birmingham (1970-1972), was among the ...
Multiverse
Term originally coined outside sf as an alternative to "universe" that supposedly avoided any presupposition of a unique and ordered creation. Its best known early use was in an 1895 speech by US philosopher-psychologist William James (1842-1910), collected in his Will to Believe (coll 1897): "Visible nature is all plasticity and indifference, a moral multiverse, as one might call it, and not a moral universe." This was anticipated by the scientist and science writer William ...
Speer, Flora
(1933- ) US author of romantic fictions, mostly nonfantastic, almost all published in the last decade of the twentieth century. Her first series, the loose Dulan's Planet sequence of Planetary Romance tales beginning with Destiny's Lovers (1990), presents a set of love stories and intrigues connected through Dulan's Planet, so-named after the archivist who long before (see ...
Kelly, William Patrick
(1848-1915) Irish soldier and author, mostly in the UK, in whose Doctor Baxter's Invention (1912) it proves possible to transfer insanity and homicidal behaviour from one person to another via a serum taken from the blood of a homicidal maniac (see Identity Transfer; Medicine). The Harrington Street Mystery (1915), a detective story, features an electro-magnetic Weapon. ...
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 ...