SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 18 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 ...
Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea
Japanese animated film (2008; vt Ponyo); original title Gake no Ue no Ponyo. Studio Ghibli. Directed and written by Hayao Miyazaki. Voice cast includes Yūki Amami, Hiroki Doi, Yuria Nana and George Tokoro. 101 minutes. Colour. / Whilst playing by the sea, five-year-old Sōsuke (Doi) finds a trapped fish whose head appears almost human. Rescuing it, he cuts his finger, which the fish licks. He names ...
Andom, R
Pseudonym of UK author Alfred Walter Barrett (1869-? ), who remains best known for We Three and Troddles: A Tale of London Life (1894), to which he wrote numerous sequels, one of which, In Fear of a Throne (1911), is a Ruritanian fantasy; and for other light fiction in the mode of popular figures like Jerome K Jerome. His sf and fantasy were similarly derivative; titles of interest ...
Reynolds, Mack
Working name of US author Dallas McCord Reynolds (1917-1983), who began writing work of genre interest with "Isolationist" in Fantastic Adventures for April 1950. He occasionally used the pseudonyms Clark Collins, Guy McCord, Mark Mallory and Dallas Ross; he wrote two Gothics as Maxine Reynolds and one other non-sf book as Todd Harding. Some of his early work was with Fredric Brown, including a Joe Mauser story, ...
Pushwagner, Hariton
Pseudonym of Norwegian artist and author of Graphic Novels Terje Brofoss (1940-2018), many of whose individual works – often in a Pop Art style executed with outsider intensity and obsessive attention to reiterated detail – express a Dystopian and Paranoid sense of urban life in the late twentieth century. His most significant narrative is Pushwagners Soft City (graph 2008; ...
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 ...