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
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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 ...
Starship Invasions
Film (1977; vt Project Genocide UK). Warner Brothers. Produced and directed by Ed Hunt. Written by Hunt. Cast includes Christopher Lee, Helen Shaver and Robert Vaughan. 89 minutes. Colour. / A small fleet of UFOs led by Captain Rameses (Lee) arrives at Earth searching for a new home for their race; their own planet Alpha's star is about to go supernova. After abducting some Earth people, Rameses's force, the Legion of the Winged Serpent, finds that his ...
Holdstock, Robert P
(1948-2009) UK author with an MSc in medical zoology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He spent 1971-1974 in medical research before becoming a full-time writer, though he had published his first story, "Pauper's Plot", for New Worlds as early as November 1968 and the amateur magazine Macrocosm in 1971-1972. He wrote much of his short fiction soon after. Among the more notable stories are the ...
Hjortsberg, William
(1941-2017) US screenwriter and author, much of whose work – like his first novel, Alp (1969), or his third, Toro! Toro! Toro! (1974) – hovers Equipoisally between a mildly gonzo Western American Magic Realism and genuine Fabulation. Gray Matters (1971), which is sf, grounds its fantastic episodes in a future Utopia where people are reborn (see ...
Fies, Brian
(? - ) US cartoonist and author whose Graphic Novel, Whatever Happened to The World of Tomorrow? (graph 2009), dramatizes the American dream of a Technology-led drive towards a Utopian future centred on a continuous move into space. The narrative traces from 1939 on a recognizable sf advocacy of early ...
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 ...