SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 24 April 2026
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 20 April 2026
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
Watson, Ian
(1943-2026) UK teacher and author who lectured in English in Tanzania (1965-1967) and Tokyo (1967-1970) before beginning to publish sf with "Roof Garden Under Saturn" for New Worlds in 1969; he then taught Future Studies for six years at Birmingham Polytechnic, taking there one of the first academic courses in sf in the UK; he became a full-time writer in 1976, publishing around 200 short stories since 1969 at a gradually increasing tempo and with visibly ...
Day the Fish Came Out, The
Film (1967). Michael Cacoyannis Productions/Twentieth Century Fox. Directed by Michael Cacoyannis. Written by Michael Cacoyannis. Cast includes Candice Bergen, Colin Blakely, Tom Courtenay, Ian Ogilvy and Sam Wanamaker. 109 minutes. Colour. / This Near-Future Greek/UK film takes off from a real-life incident in which the US Air Force accidentally lost two H-bombs off the coast of Spain. A NATO bomber crashes into the sea near a small Greek island, ...
Tachyons
There is an only half-facetious precept in Physics stating that "anything which is not prohibited is compulsory". Olexa-Myron Bilaniuk and E C George Sudarshan suggested in 1962, and Gerald Feinberg in 1967, that the idea of a particle that can only travel Faster Than Light does not violate any of the basic maxims of Relativistic physics. Such a hypothetical particle (a tachyon, as opposed to ...
Whaley, John Corey
(1984- ) US author of Young Adult fiction; his impressive first novel, Where Things Come Back (2011), is nonfantastic. But his second, Noggin (2014), depicts the Near Future surgical removal of its teenage protagonist's head (see Brain in a Box) after he has died of leukaemia, and Cryogenically stored for several ...
Watson, Simon
(? - ) UK author of No Man's Land (1975), set in a Dystopian Near Future Britain based on a coercive concentration of the working class community-destructive high-rise tenements. Something similar had in fact happened in the real world during the twentieth century after World War Two, a process flagrantly contradictive of the pre-War English ...
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 ...