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Tuesday 21 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: John Howard
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 ...
Peck, Wallace
Pseudonym of the unidentified US author (? -? ) of The Golden Age of Patents: A Parody on Yankee Inventiveness (1888 chap), which describes a series of spoof Inventions, sometimes with an effect of Satire, though some Yankee inspirations are narrated as tall tales. The illustrations are amusing. [JC]
Ward, David [2]
(1967- ) Canadian teacher and author whose Grasslands Young Adult sequence beginning with Escape the Mask (2001) places its young cast in a rural world dominated, all the same, by a Dystopian tyranny, which they must escape. Archipelago (2008) takes its contemporary protagonist via Time Travel 14,000 years into the past, where he interacts with ...
Herbert, William
Pseudonym of the unidentified UK author (? -? ) of The World Grown Young: Being a Brief Record of Reforms Carried Out from 1894-1914 by the Late Mr Philip Adams, Millionaire and Philanthropist (1892), a placidly tendentious record of Near-Future reforms imposed benevolently from above upon a grateful UK by its richest citizen. Attacks by Russia and the USA are routinely defeated. [JC]
Thomson, James
Working name of Scottish poet and author James Thompson (1834-1882), best known for "The City of Dreadful Night" (1874 National Reformer as Bysshe Vanolis; 1975 chap), a long narrative poem whose rendering of an apocalyptic City very much like London contains a profusion of images and tropes that prefigure Steampunk and Urban Fantasy (see The ...
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 ...