SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 15 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
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
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 ...
Isle, Sue
Legal name until 2014 of Australian author Alex Isle (1963- ), who changed their gender identity in that year; work before 2014 is signed Sue Isle. They began to publish work of genre interest with "Nightwings" in Aurealis for April 1990. Most of their subsequent work, much of it sf, has been Young Adult, though Scale of Dragon, Tooth of Wolf (1996) is a coming-of-age fantasy, with ...
Lott, Tim
(1956- ) UK memoirist and author of a Young Adult sf novel, Fearless (2007), set in a Near Future Dystopian Britain and tracing the rebellion of a girl, one of a thousand incarcerated within the sweatshop-like City Community Faith School, though her description of her ordeal is disbelieved in the corroded world outside the walls. [JC]
Manes, Stephen
(1949- ) US author on computer issues from the early 1980s, well-known for the "Digital Tools" column in Forbes; and author of several novels for the Young Adult and the younger children markets, the comical Oscar Noodleman sequence – comprising That Game from Outerspace: The First Strange Thing That Happened to Oscar Noodleman (1983 chap), ...
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 ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...