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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 ...
Carr, Robert Spencer
(1909-1994) US author, who began publishing work of sf interest as a teenager with "The Composite Brain" in Weird Tales for March 1925; his first novel, The Rampant Age (1928), which is not fantastic, was also precocious. He was the author of one fantasy novel filled with an erotic nostalgia for death, The Room Beyond (1948), and of Beyond Infinity (coll 1951), four warmly realized stories set on Earth in the ...
Hamilton, Virginia
(1936-2002) US author, mostly of juveniles, and of very considerable interest in that field for the exploratory intensity of her work, from Zeely (1967) on, and for the depth of her presentation of the complex experience of being Black in the USA (her maternal grandfather was an escaped slave). Several of her better-known tales, like M.C. Higgins, the Great (1974) and Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush (1982), are fantasies. Of particular sf interest is the ...
Burton, Tim
(1958- ) US filmmaker, resident in the UK since 2002, all of whose films have been fantasy of one kind or another. An animator by background who has intermittently returned to the medium, Burton made his live-action debut on Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (1985) and had a surprise hit with his second feature Beetlejuice (1988), which landed him the high-stakes job of directing Warner's prize project Batman. A major success, it led to three ...
Weekley, Richard
(1945- ) US teacher, poet and author of an sf Satire, The Adventures of Chet Blake – Plastic Man (1975), in which a Near Future rock group upsets the applecart, exposing some of the flaws of the new world. [JC]
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 ...