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 ...
Donovan, Rita
(1955- ) Canadian author of one Dystopia, The Plague Saint (1997), set in a Ruined Earth Canada riddled by a Pandemic and Religion, and tracing the destiny of a young woman manhandled into sainthood and martyrdom. [JC]
Kheir, Mohamed
(1977- ) Egyptian journalist and author whose fourth novel, Eflat Al Asabea (2018; trans Robin Moger as Slipping 2021), sophisticatedly represents a Fantastic Voyage through the riches and detritus of post 2011 Egypt via fluent weddings of the topoi of world-Fantastika: dream visions; palimpsests that create edifices of the past and the present and the future; nightmares of ...
Lester, Richard
Working name of US Television and Cinema writer, producer and director Richard Lester Liebman (1932- ), also credited as Dick Lester from 1955 to 1963; in the UK since 1955. He was influential in 1960s "Swinging England" with such Zeitgeist-attuned pop-culture productions as The Beatles' A Hard Day's Night (1964). His first sf film was the comedy The Mouse on the Moon (1963), based on ...
Cthulhu Mythos
This Shared-World background derives from stories by H P Lovecraft, notably "The Call of Cthulhu" (February 1928 Weird Tales). The Mythos was elaborated by members of Lovecraft's circle, including Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Robert E Howard, Frank Belknap ...
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 ...