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Wednesday 22 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 ...
Fry, Lena Jane
(? -? ) US author, the larger part of whose Other Worlds [for full title see Checklist] (coll 1905) describes a lightly fictionalized socialist Utopia set on the planet Herschel, named after the composer and astronomer William Herschel (1738-1822), who discovered Uranus; the volume also includes a short story, "The Planet Venus", in which the inhabitants of Venus view Earth through a telescope ...
Vickers, Salley
(1948- ) UK poet and author, active from around 2000, most of whose work is nonfantastical. Mr Golightly's Holiday (2003) features a faded novelist who finds that, via some tentative musings about his next book, has become the Secret Master of the small village where he is staying; Jehovah is invoked. A literal reading of Where Three Roads Meet (2007; vt Where Three Roads Meet: The Myth of Oedipus ...
Port Sinister
Film (1953; vt Beast of Paradise Isle UK). American Pictures Company/RKO Radio Pictures. Produced by Aubrey Wisberg and Jack Pollexfen. Directed by Harold Daniels. Written by Wisberg and Pollexfen. Special effects by Jack Rabin. Cast includes Paul Cavanagh, Lynne Roberts, William Schallert and James Warren. 65 minutes. Black and white. / Port Royal was a pirate stronghold on an unnamed Caribbean Island which sank during an earthquake in the ...
Healy, Dominic
(? -? ) Australian author, involved in trade union activities, in whose first sf tale, The Story of a Lost Planet; Or, the Wonderful Submarine (1919 chap), the trade-union survivor of the destruction of Earth recounts these events to sympathetic auditors on Canopus. The female protagonist of his second, A Voyage to Venus (1943), after escaping the human settlement on Venus, encounters a spoof culture of ...
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 ...