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 ...
Brown, Reynold
(1917-1991) US commercial artist who worked as a cartoonist early in his career, and also illustrated magazines in the post-World War Two years. He began creating film poster art around 1950 and was quite prolific in this area, producing dozens of posters for Cinema on into the 1960s. Many of the films concerned were sf or horror, including The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), ...
St John, J Allen
Working name of American artist James Allen St John (1872-1957). After a peripatetic upbringing with wealthy parents, St John settled in New York in 1891, received artistic training with the Art Students League, began painting portraits and landscapes for prominent figures in New York society, and briefly taught at the New York School of Art. In 1904 he relocated to his hometown of Chicago, wrote and illustrated one book, The Face in the Pool: A Faerie Tale (1905), and was soon ...
Templeton, Charles
(1915-2001) Canadian newspaper editor, evangelist, broadcaster and author whose novels of sf interest were written long after he had lost his Christian faith. In Act of God (1977) the skeleton of Jesus of Nazareth is found, a discovery which disrupts the world's Christian Religions. A Near Future Utopia is falteringly created in World of One (1988), with evangelism exercising a ...
Saxton, Josephine
(1935- ) UK author who began publishing sf with "The Wall" in Science Fantasy #78 for November 1965, and whose first three novels – The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith (1969), Vector for Seven: The Weltanschaung of Mrs Amelia Mortimer and Friends [sic] (1970) and Group Feast (1971) – established her very rapidly as an inventive creator of sf ...
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 ...