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 ...
Drinkwater, Mark
Pseudonym of US soldier, publisher and editor Nathaniel King (1767-1848), author of the book-length narrative poem, The United Worlds, a Poem, in Fifty Seven Books (1834), an ambitious secular Utopia set in a Symmes-style Hollow Earth located mostly beneath America; Symmes is mentioned in the text. Though it moves rapidly into the Near Future, the ...
Anderson, A J
(1863-1927) UK author on various subjects; his sf novel, Professor Aylmer's Experiment (1922), uneasily marries occultism and experimental science as its eponymous protagonist attempts to create artificial life (see Invention; Mad Scientist). The Soul-Sifters: A Novel of Psycho-Analysis (1923), about a case of Amnesia caused by experiences in ...
Hilliers, Ashton
Pseudonym of UK businessman, zoologist and author Henry Marriage Wallis (1854-1941), Honorary Curator of Zoology (Vertebrates) at Reading Museum in England in the early twentieth century; his Prehistoric SF tale, The Master-Girl (1910), features, unusually, a female protagonist who carries most of the action, creates the necessary Inventions, and founds a warrior band of Amazons [see The ...
Mighels, Ella Sterling
(1853-1934) US author, almost all of whose work, fiction and nonfiction, deals with her native California; she was married to Philip Verrill Mighels. Her short Lost Race novel, Fairy Tale of the White Man: Told from the Gates of Sunset (1915 chap), sites the origin of the White Man in her home state, and describes a complex ancient urban civilization in glowing terms. [JC]
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 ...