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 ...
Hodder-Williams, Christopher
(1926-1995) UK author, pilot, composer and sound engineer; a member of the family which owned and managed his main early publisher. His first novel, The Cummings Report (1957) as by James Brogan, was not sf. Hodder-Williams began publishing sf with Chain Reaction (1959), which concerns itself, as does almost all of his fiction, with the relationship between Man and the machine Technology he has created, in this case through a mystery ...
Anderson, Poul
(1926-2001) US author born in Pennsylvania of Scandinavian parents; he lived in Denmark briefly before the outbreak of World War Two. In 1948 he gained a degree in physics from the University of Minnesota. His knowledge of Scandinavian languages and literature and his scientific literacy fed each other fruitfully through a long and successful career, during which he gained for overall achievement the SFWA Grand Master Award in 1978; he was inducted ...
Emerson, Jim
Pseudonym of Croatian-born psychologist, librarian, editor and author James Mladenovic (1960- ), in US from 1963. He is of sf interest primarily for an ambitious attempt to recount the History of SF from the beginnings of American Genre SF, the first iteration of this project being a Semiprozine, Futures Past (1992-1994) (which see for ...
Acid Mothers Temple
Prolific Japanese space-rock band who released over fifty albums under various names in their first decade, and who specialize in prolonged shambolic improvised jam-session music. Albums include Acid Mothers Temple & the Melting Paraiso U.F.O. (1997), 41st Century Splendid Man (2002), Univers Zen, ou de zéro à zéro (2002) and Hypnotic Liquid Machine from the Golden Utopia (2004); but ...
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 ...