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 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 ...
North, Emet
(? - ) US translator and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Real Animals" in Lightspeed for June 2020. His first novel, In Universes (fixup 2024), follows its protagonist Raffi in a Fantastic Voyage through various versions of the Multiverse in a search for satisfactory iterations and/or ...
Sale, David
(1932- ) UK-born author, television screenwriter and producer, born Ernest Swindells, in Australia for many years since emigrating in 1950; he remains best known for creating and producing in Australia The Mavis Bramston Show (1964-1968), a Satirical review. His first novel, Come to Mother (1971), which is set in the Near Future, traces the consequences of the re-awakening of a woman ...
Gask, Arthur
(1869-1951) UK-born dental surgeon and author who began his latter career in the early 1921, after his 1920 move to Australia. Among his many detective thrillers are two tales of some sf interest, The Red Paste Murders (1924; vt Murder in the Night 1932), the eponymous chemical being of borderline-sf composition, and The Fall of a Dictator (1939), which ventures into the Near Future. [JC]
Kingsnorth, Paul
(1972- ) UK journalist and author, active from the early 1990s, much of whose nonfiction has dealt with the planetary environment, his earlier work focusing on Ecology as such, though the devouring issue of Climate Change clearly became of increasing concern. He is of sf interest for the Buccmaster trilogy comprising The Wake (2015), Beast (2017) and Alexandria ...
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 ...