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Sunday 20 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.
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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 ...
Sturgeon, Theodore
(1918-1985) Working name of US author born Edward Hamilton Waldo in New York City, later adopting his stepfather's surname and taking on a new first name; Argyll (1993 chap) prints a long anguished letter Sturgeon wrote to his stepfather, plus an autobiographical essay from 1965, both of which more than confirm the hints of emotional turmoil implied by these name changes; partner of Jayne Tannehill 1976-1985. Certainly Sturgeon early suffered or ...
Mader, Friedrich W
(1866-1945) German author, mainly of juvenile novels, many set in German East Africa and written somewhat in the style of H Rider Haggard. Wunderwelten (1911; trans Max Shachtman as Distant Worlds: The Story of a Voyage to the Planets 1932) is a juvenile which takes its Spaceship crew to Mars and finally – one of the first sf texts to ...
Repp, Ed Earl
(1901-1979) US advertising man, newspaper reporter and author; he wrote a large number of fairly unremarkable Pulp-magazine adventures for about a decade from 1929, ceasing to produce sf during World War Two, after his work as a screenwriter began to pick up; between 1934 and 1957 he wrote about fifty scripts, all Westerns. Some of his short fiction appeared as by Bradnor Buckner. His first sf story – "Beyond Gravity" in ...
Shawn, Wallace
(1943- ) US actor and playwright, very active in the former capacity; some of his roles – including a part of Strange Invaders (1983), the comic villain Vizzini in The Princess Bride (1987) and Grand Negus Zek in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – are of genre interest. As a playwright, the transgressive and Absurdist works of ...
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 ...