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 ...
Zhao Haihong
(1977- ) Chinese author, translator from English and teacher, mainly associated with the Gongshang College of Foreign Languages in Hangzhou, who won a Yinhe Award with a landslide victory for her "Yi'ekasida" ["Jocasta"] (March 1999 Kehuan Shijie), and whose short stories dominated the awards for several years thereafter. Her short story "Tui" (2000 Kehuan Shijie trans Zhao ...
Dalcher, Christina
(?1968- ) US theoretical linguist and author whose first novel Vox (2018) intensifies (if possible) the Dystopian nightmare of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985) through the depiction of a Near Future America where females are allowed to speak only 100 words a day; the penalties for disobedience are sadistic (see ...
Schneeman, Charles
(1912-1972) American artist. After artistic training at the Pratt School of Art and Design and Grand Central School of Art, he began doing interior illustrations and occasional covers for John W Campbell Jr's Astounding Science-Fiction in the late 1930s. It is his interior illustrations that are best remembered, particularly those that accompanied Jack Williamson's The Legion of Time ...
Stanley, William
(1829-1909) UK engineer and author, often on economic issues; of sf interest is The Case of The. Fox: Being His Prophecies under Hypnotism of the Period Ending A.D. 1950. A Political Utopia (1903). Hypnosis releases the "prophetic mental element" in an impoverished poet, Theodore Fox; the Utopia he describes in a series of visions, with its Federal Europe, electrified cars and Channel Tunnel (see ...
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 ...