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 ...
Cornett, Robert
(1952-2022) US author who saw military service and also worked inter alia as paramedic, firefighter, postal worker, private investigator, and academic. He began to publish work of genre interest with Remember the Alamo? (1980; vt Remember the Alamo! 1986) as Robert Charles Cornett in collaboration with Kevin D Randle, opening the Time Mercenaries sequence of Military SF involving ...
Fast, Jonathan
(1948- ) US composer and author, son of Howard Fast, who wrote music before coming to sf with "Decay" for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1975. His first novel, The Secrets of Synchronicity (1977; vt Prisoner of the Planets 1980), is a complex Space Opera which, unusually for the form, is a Satire that ...
Holmberg, John-Henri
(1949- ) Swedish editor, translator and critic. An sf reader since the age of six, Holmberg became active in Swedish fandom at thirteen, during the following 25 years publishing some 300 issues of Fanzines, chairing sf clubs and several Conventions and in 1977 starting the first sf bookstore in Sweden. For his fan activities, he received the international Big Heart ...
Play by Mail
Term used to describe a game in which the players communicate by (physical) post. Typically all participants send their moves in at regular intervals to a central moderator, who processes the orders simultaneously and returns the results. The moderator is generally the only individual involved to know the current state of all the pieces belonging to every player. Sf examples include Starweb (1976) and ...
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 ...