SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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.
Site updated on 16 July 2025
Sponsor of the day: Ted Chiang
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 ...
Adams, Pamela Crippen
(1961- ) US editor whose first publication of genre interest was Friends of the Horseclans (anth 1987) with her husband Robert Adams, a Tie to Adams's Post-Holocaust Horseclans sequence, here opened up to others as a Shared World. Besides Adams himself, contributors included Steven Barnes, ...
Merrill, James
(1926-1995) US author and poet whose two novels are nonfantastic, as is most of his poetry, which is of the highest calibre, and justifies his ranking as one of the most important American poets of his century. He is of indirect but significant sf interest, and may be deemed a central figure of twentieth-century Fantastika, for The Changing Light at Sandover (omni 1982) [see Checklist for details of component parts], a sustained 17,000 line verse ...
Le Guin, Ursula K
(1929-2018) US author and poet, based in Portland, Oregon, whose first novel was published in 1966; by 1970 she was already recognized as one of the most important writers within the field. Decades before her death, her reputation had extended far beyond the readership of Genre SF, while within the genre she was honoured with five Hugos and six Nebulas; as much attention has been paid to her by the academic ...
Winslow, Pauline Glen
(1926-2014) UK author, long resident in the USA, in whose I, Martha Adams (1982) the Cold War suddenly ends in a Russian nuclear strike (see World War Three) and the Near-Future Invasion of an unprepared America. Luckily the (now assassinated) President Reagan had secretly redirected funds meant for socialist water projects into developing a secret ...
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 ...