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 ...
May, Karl
(1842-1912) German author, much of whose output consisted of Westerns conceived under the clear influence of James Fenimore Cooper; the most famous of these is the Winnetou sequence, featuring the eponymous Native American (as noble as many Germans) and the white man, Old Shatterhand (a projection of the author), the central story being told in Winnetou, der rote Gentleman ...
Owens, Clarke
(1951- ) US author whose nonfiction work consists mostly of literary criticism, including the unorthodox Biblical study Son of Yahweh: The Gospels as Novels (2013). Two of his novels are of sf interest: 600ppm: A Novel of Climate Change (2015), set in a Dystopian Near Future America where an alliance of profit-hungry corporations and a supine government has shut down any discussion ...
Dyroff, Charlee
(? - ) US author whose first novel, Loneliness & Company (2024), is set in the Near Future Dystopian shambles of New York; the alert young protagonist becomes involved in Cultural Engineering project in which an AI is learning how to keep humans from feeling lonely. The answer seems ...
Brunngraber, Rudolf
(1901-1960) German industrial designer and author, active for many years. In his sf novel Radium: Roman eines Elements (1936; trans Eden and Cedar Paul 1937), a near-contemporary corner on the radium market (see Elements) causes Near Future troubles in a hospital using it as a Medicine to cure cancer. He also wrote the script for the film ...
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 ...