SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 20 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 ...
Future Fire, The
UK-based but otherwise international downloadable Online Magazine edited by Djibril Alayad. It published 21 issues from January 2005 to June 2010 and resumed publication in February 2012 after an eighteen-month hiatus. It originally proclaimed itself "New Writing in Speculative Fiction and Dark Fantasy", though most issues usually carried only one or two stories and the emphasis was on reviews, critical essays and Interviews. ...
Pollock, Walter Herries
(1850-1926) UK editor, man-of-letters and author, some of whose work is of sf interest, though "Sir Jocelyn's Cap", his collaboration with Walter Besant in the latter's Uncle Jack, etc. (coll 1885), is fantasy. Other fantasy tales are assembled in A Nine Men's Morrice: Stories Collected and Re-Collected (coll 1889) and King Zub, and Other Stories (coll 1893). Of more sf interest is He (1887) with Andrew ...
Vlahos, Len
(? - ) US rock musician, bookseller and author of Young Adult tales, initially nonfantastic. He is of sf interest for his fourth novel, Hard Wired (2020), the first-person confession of an AI from the point "he" becomes aware of his nature at the age of ten; after running through his invented past, he more or less takes over the Internet, applying his vast ...
Johns, Willy
(? - ) US author known only for The Fabulous Journey of Hieronymus Meeker (1954), a Fantastic Voyage tale in which a Gulliver-like protagonist (see Gulliver; Jonathan Swift) travels in the good ship Jeemarad to a planet where he discovers a Utopia based on constant transformation. [JC]
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 ...