SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 19 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 ...
Star*Line
US Print Magazine of sf, Fantasy, and horror Poetry, founded by Suzette Haden Elgin and edited by Jean-Paul L Garnier since 2021. Initially monthly, then bimonthly, later quarterly, January 1978 to current. / Star*Line has been the official publication of The Science Fiction Poetry Association (from 2017 the ...
Ukraine
Any account of Ukrainian Fantastika must distinguish between works written in Ukraine and works written in Ukrainian, a Venn diagram of contending linguistic and political forces. These include a sub-genre of "emigre" fiction, written in Germany, France, Canada and the United States up until the 1960s, works written in what is now the geographic territory of Ukraine, ...
D'Ammassa, Don
(1946- ) US critic and author who has until recently been best known over the past three decades or so for his very numerous reviews, in Science Fiction Chronicle and elsewhere; his work – usually couched in long-capsule form – is noted for its fairness and generosity, and for the extremely wide range of texts he has covered. His Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2005), which clearly draws on this vast ...
Lynn, Elizabeth A
(1946- ) US author who began to publish work of sf interest with "We All Have to Go" in the crime fiction anthology Tricks and Treats (anth 1976) edited by Joe Gores and Bill Pronzini. This was assembled with other early work in The Woman Who Loved the Moon and Other Stories (coll 1981), whose contents were selected for Tales from a Vanished Country (coll 1990), which also includes ...
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 ...