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Monday 20 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 14 April 2026
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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 ...
Balloons
For some six months in 1783 Paris was the Cape Canaveral of the eighteenth century as Parisians watched a succession of extraordinary ascents by hot-air balloons. The first successful manned trip took place on 21 November, as reported by Benjamin Franklin, and it started off a long series of speculations about the conquest of the air, almost certainly the first fictional response being The Aerostatic Spy: Or, Excursions with an Air Balloon by an Aerial Traveller (1785; exp vt ...
Crommelin, May
Working name of Irish author Mary Henriette de la Cherois Crommelin (1849-1930), mostly in England from around 1885, active as a writer of romantic novels – many of them historicals – from 1874; she worked in at least three London hospitals during World War One. Of some sf interest is The Luck of a Lowland Laddie (1900), an adventure set in South America whose protagonists are chased for several chapters by a carnivorous tree. Despite ...
Laurie, André
Pseudonym of Paschal Grousset (1844-1909), French politician and author. His first political novel, Le rève d'un irreconciliable ["Dream of a Diehard"] (1869) and several political works were published under his real name, but thereafter he used the Laurie pseudonym. While living as a communard exile in London, Laurie wrote the original version of the book which was later published – significantly modified – as Les Cinq Cent Millions de la Begum ...
Long, Jeff
(1951- ) US author, initially of mountaineering novels, who made his genre debut with The Descent (1999). While including some mountaineering, this Horror thriller posits that the myth of Hell derives from a worldwide realm of Underground caverns inhabited by a Lost Race of "hadals". The hostile environment has caused many of these human-related cannibals to ...
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 ...