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.
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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 ...
Brooks-Dalton, Lily
(1987- ) US author whose first novel, Good Morning, Midnight (2016), depicts a Near Future that may have been brought to silence by a Disaster, though none is specified. The main protagonist, an astronomer entering old age on Earth, seems convinced at points that he is the Last Man left, though he is soon involved in keeping a small girl alive in his abandoned ...
Wonders of the Spaceways
UK pocketbook-size magazine, published by John Spencer, London; edited by Samuel Assael and Maurice Nahum, both uncredited. Ten numbered, undated issues 1951-1954. / One of the four poor-quality Spencer juvenile-sf magazines of the 1950s, all very similar, the others being Futuristic Science Stories, Tales of Tomorrow, and ...
Doughty, Francis W
(1850-1917) US numismatist, scholar, screenwriter and author whose well written, ingenious and original dime novels (see Dime-Novel SF) have often been considered the finest examples of the category. His better stories present a succession of highly imaginative strokes, often with good historical backgrounds. The title figure in "The Man in the Black Cloak" (1886 The Boys of New York) as by P T Raymond – a man whose betrayal has turned him ...
Collingwood, Harry
Pseudonym of UK civil engineer and author William Joseph Cosens Lancaster (1843-1922), most of whose fiction – he wrote at least 40 books – was for boys and featured nautical settings. He remains best known for his "Flying Fish" sequence of sf tales: The Log of the "Flying Fish": A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure (1887), With Airship and Submarine: A Tale of Adventure (1907) and ...
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 ...