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 ...
Rogers, Lebbeus Harding
(1847-1932) US businessman and author whose The Kite Trust (A Romance of Wealth) (1900), which may have been self-published, follows the juvenile kite-inventors and founders of the eponymous compact into adulthood, enormous wealth, the discovery of new Power Sources and the construction of transatlantic tunnels (see Under the Sea), while all the while an interplanetary spirit instructs the cast on the history of ...
Found Footage
A term infelicitously but irreversibly appropriated since 1999 to denote fictional feature films, particularly in Horror genres, which emulate venerable epistolary and documentary modes of textuality by using elements of non-fiction film form and simulated amateur-video footage. (Previously the term had marked a class of documentary film distinguished by the incorporation of archive and amateur footage into an assembled feature with or without commentary, a ...
Science Fiction Oral History Association
A non-profit US corporation (SFOHA for short) founded in 1975 with the aim of preserving aspects of sf history in audio-recorded form. The SFOHA's remit is to tape and archive Interviews and other oral material (including Convention speeches) relevant to the history and working of sf as both subculture and literature; against the studied disinclination of Fandom to perform this ongoing task with any ...
Tennant, Emma
(1937-2017) UK editor and author whose first acknowledged novel – her actual first, The Colour of Rain (1964) as by Catherine Aydy, was not sf – is The Time of the Crack (short version as "The Crack" in New Worlds 5, anth 1973, ed Michael Moorcock; exp 1973; vt The Crack 1978), an sf novel about an inexplicable faultline – described in terms that imply a gamut of meanings, from ...
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 ...