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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 ...
Cline, Ernest
(1972- ) US screenwriter and author whose Ready Player sequence, beginning with Ready Player One (2011), is set in a Near Future 2044 where Climate Change and other degradations have made the external world profoundly unpleasant. In this context, the creation of a total-immersion Cyberspace-styled Virtual Reality ...
Stümpke, Harald
Pseudonym of German zoologist and author Gerold Steiner (1908-2008) for his spoof exercise in imaginary zoology (see Biology), Bau und Leben Der Rhingradentia (1962 chap; trans Leigh Chadwick as The Snouters: Form and Life of the Rhinogrades 1967 chap). The Rhinogrades, or snouters, are a new order of mammals discovered in Hi-yi-yi, an unknown Archipelago in the Pacific Ocean. Unfortunately, an American ...
Cecil, Henry
Pseudonym of Henry Cecil Leon (1902-1976), UK barrister and later County Court judge who wrote numerous witty, legally knowledgable stories, generally revolving around courtrooms, ingenious crimes, eccentric lawyers and unreliable witnesses. The most famous is Brothers in Law (1955), which was filmed in 1957. His first work of genre interest seems to be the brief and flippant ghost story, "Proof" (April 1964 Argosy UK), collected in ...
Coppel, Alfred
Working name of US author (and wartime fighter pilot) Alfredo José de Araña-Marini y Coppel Jr (1921-2004) who also wrote as Robert Cham Gilman and Sol Galaxan (for one story only, 1953). He began publishing sf with "Age of Unreason" in Astounding for December 1947, and published a good deal of magazine fiction in the next decade, though he was in fact producing considerably more in other genres with such action novels as Hero Driver (1954). ...
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 ...