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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 ...
Penmare, William
Pseudonym of UK author Mavis Elizabeth Hocking Nisot (1893-1973) which she used for two of her novels, the second, The Man Who Could Stop War (1929), being a Near Future Scientific Romance in which the Invention of an immobilizing gas helps thwart a Russian Invasion. She is better known for her detective tales as E H Nisot. [JC]
Williams, Eric C
(1918-2010) UK author, previously a bookseller and involved with Fandom from the 1930s, publishing some fiction at that time in Fanzines, beginning with the simultaneous appearance of "Mr Hazel's Miracle Carpet" and "The Venus Vein" in Amateur Science Stories for December 1937. He began publishing sf professionally with "The Silent Ship" (July 1965 New Worlds) and ...
Unno Jūza
Pseudonym of author Shōichi Sano (1897-1949), sometimes rendered as Jūzō Unno, regarded along with Shunrō Oshikawa as one of the "founding fathers" of science fiction in Japan. He also published several works of nonfiction as by Kyūjūrō Oka, among other pen-names. A graduate in electrical engineering from Waseda University, Unno's first sale was the scientific detective story "Denkifuro no Kaishi ...
Levene, Philip
(1926-1973) UK scriptwriter and credited co-author of City of the Hidden Eyes (1960) with J L Morrissey, based on Levene's eight-part BBC Radio serial from 27 April 1959, in which the surface world is threatened by Monsters who occupy a City far Underground; it is likely that adaptation of script to novel was entirely by Morrissey. ...
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 ...