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Wednesday 16 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 ...
Torg
Role Playing Game (1990). West End Games (WEG). Designed by Greg Gorden. / Despite a certain crudity of expression, Torg is perhaps the most interesting of the several Science and Sorcery RPGs whose settings combine multiple literary genres, typically sf, fantasy and horror. Rifts (1990 Palladium) designed by Kevin Siembieda is ...
Green, Evie
Pseudonym of UK author Emily Barr (1971- ) who under her own name has written several travel books, twelve nonfantastic novels, and at least three nonfantastic young adult tales. We Hear Voices (2020) as by Green, set in the Near Future after a coronavirus-like Pandemic (see also Disaster) has savaged the planet, focuses on a young boy under the influence of an ...
Wallace, David Foster
(1962-2008) US author who began publishing work of interest with "The Planet Trillaphon as it Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing" for the Amherst Review in 1984; the story combines a post-modernist sensibility – the planet in question is a non-metaphorized vision of the internal architecture of a distressed mind roiled by anti-depressant Drugs – and a presciently sf-like recognition that Perception does not only ...
Williams, Sheila
(1956- ) US editor long associated with the magazine Asimov's Science Fiction, where she began her career in 1982, working initially with Shawna McCarthy and then with Gardner Dozois, and on the latter's retirement becoming editor in 2004 (as of the January 2005 issue). She has deftly and responsibly maintained the quality of the magazine in a period when print journals ...
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 ...